


kin & keeper

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child Abuse, Depression, Discussion of canonical character death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 12:59:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 106,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1551332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On May 5th, 1983, an infant boy is carried for the first time through the doorway of a house in Lawrence, Kansas.</p><p>This is Dean’s first memory of his brother. There are others. They are vivid, angry, and relentless—and now, six months after Sam’s leap into Hell, they are coming to him with alarming frequency. He’s trying his best to live the easy apple-pie life he swore himself to, but the more he remembers, the harder it gets to ignore Sam’s shadow filling up the corners of Lisa Braeden’s house. What’s worse, he has no idea what the onslaught of these memories portend—or in what ways they will change him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> This story assumes the Sam is never raised from Hell, whether by Cas or anyone else.

_It's okay, Dean._

 

_It's gonna be okay._

 

_I've got him._

 

* * *

 

**I.**

 

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

Lisa Braeden kept a calendar on the pantry door.

 

Dean was told that every year for Christmas, as a tradition, Ben got her a new one, and she kept all the old ones, marked up with ballpoint pen and sticky notes, in a basket of mementos in her office drawer, as reminders of each past set of months and all the things, good and bad, planned and unplanned, that had happened. Colourful Wal-Mart catalogues of life.

 

The one that hung on her pantry door was ten months old, and it was the only one Dean had ever used. He hadn't been there long enough for a new one to take its place.

 

Early October—Cicero, Indiana—a calendar made of cheap paper hanging on a nail in the wooden pantry door was, at that point, becoming as familiar to him as the sound of the morning radio that woke him up every weekday at six o'clock, as the smell of the Folger's Lisa put into the coffee maker at night, as the groan and complaint of the white work pickup Dean coaxed awake in the driveway when the dew was still on the grass and the birds still singing in the cool early fog. The calendar was the first thing he saw when he went into the kitchen for breakfast, the last thing he saw after checking the locks on the windows above the sink at night. Its loose corners lifted and fell when he walked past.

 

The calendar was used in the way that everything in the Braeden house was used—frequently, and with love. On the page of each flipped month the indent of the pen on the month before could be seen, doctor's appointments overlaid with baseball games, the birthdays of neighbours warping the tiny black standard print of _Ramadan_ and _Summer Bank Holiday._ Sometimes—as Dean came to learn—Lisa even flipped back the pages, pen cap held between her white white teeth, and added an event to a day that had already passed, as a reminder that it had occurred.

 

Good things—a Saturday in August they had gone, like a family, to a bowling alley in town. Ben had bowled a better game than Dean and had teased him about for hours afterward. They'd come home with faces sore from laughter. She wanted to remember it, to be able to look at it the next year or the year after and smile about it; Dean had stood in the kitchen doorway, shoulder against the siding, watching her pen it in with her neat curling handwriting.

 

Bad things, too. One day in September Lisa's favourite aunt had passed away. She'd written that in after she'd come home from the funeral, her lips tight, her face sad. Dean had held her, in her pain.

 

Once, at the beginning of autumn, Dean took it off the door on a morning when Lisa wasn't home, just to look at it, to marvel at the normalcy of it. He lived in a house, now, with a woman and a boy who used things like calendars, who had the luxury of planning things out on it. It was like an anchor, a paperweight. A real thing. He liked it.

 

He flipped backwards to find glimpses of days he hadn't been there for, barbecues he hadn't known about, the spring Field Day at Ben's school. A breast cancer scare outlined perfectly in a series of appointments with Lisa's OB/GYN across the faded aisles of March. It was like a diary, only more honest.

 

When he looked at May, he found himself.

 

Lisa had penciled that in, too. It was a nondescript day in the middle of the month, after a block filled in with a reminder of a baseball practise at the city-owned fields.

 

In red ballpoint: _Dean came._

 

One of her after-the-fact notations, right there, letters digging into the page like claws hooking into skin. After that he was on every page; he was a part of it. Of them.

 

He put the calendar back on the nail and left it.

 

October was the fifth month he'd lived here, give or take a day or two. When he thought about it it seemed like a blip in the time-line in his brain—nothing at all compared to his thirty-odd years of a completely different way of being, the life he still had in the depths of his bones, carved out of road signs, gunpowder residue, aliases, blood. Sometimes he still felt as if he were undercover in some way, as if eventually he'd have to get up and leave this house, these people, the calendar with him in it, to find something else—but he wasn't undercover; he wouldn't have to do that. Five months, really, wasn't very long at all, but it felt like years.

 

Time confused him.

 

After he found his own arrival date marked down in bygone May on that calendar he never looked at the old months again. That was for Lisa to do; those were her memories, the things she thought important. He didn't feel as if he warranted that block of desperate space, no matter how long he'd been here. Sometimes, the pages of the calendar fell down, reopening a month that had been closed, and Dean was quick to put them back up again, afraid to look should he see that red ballpoint reminder. He was quick to hook the little punched-out holes over the nail and smoothe out October again, the pads of his fingers running over the corrugated lines of Lisa's writing.

 

Sam died in May. May wasn't a good month anymore.

* * *

 

But there had been May. Dark, stormy May. Dean didn't think about May if he could help it. Even now, in the harvest months, which were dark but not stormy, not raw, he tried his hardest to forget that May had ever happened, that it would ever happen again; it seemed blasphemous, almost. Uncouth that the Earth should turn and drop him back into it eventually.

 

June hadn't been much better. He couldn't remember much of June; even the calendar didn't help with that. He remembered alcohol, and everything the colour of bottle-glass, amber and brown, but past that he could only recall the sadness, the touch of Lisa's hand. He'd been drunk most if not all of June, but his veins had still felt on fire with grief, and nothing had tempered them. Somehow he'd lasted.

 

July, in his mind, was neon orange and yellow and the smell of sawdust and everything too bright, too much. The construction job Lisa's neighbour across the street had hooked him up with. The neighbour's name was Sid, and Dean was grateful for the work, if only because it gave him something to do with himself, a way to sweat and hurt in silence, to exhaust himself enough that nightmares began not to bother with him. Fewer bottles. Nothing else.

 

August was kinder. More beer, less whiskey, sweeter sunshine. He'd kissed Lisa a lot that month. He'd gone to the Home Depot and bought four cans of bright orange spray paint and, on a day off from work, had painted Devil's Traps under the rugs at each door, and explained them to Lisa that night after Ben had gone to bed. She'd nodded, understood, and asked him to show her how to draw one on a pad of notepaper. Her steady hand, her eye for detail—she'd committed it to memory in an hour, and he was proud.

 

September was the best month so far, hanging kindly on the clothesline of his memory. Calm. Good things, peaceful nights.

 

Lisa's aunt died in the middle of the month and she went to the funeral two states over, and Castiel came to visit him in her absence, for the second time since Terrible May. Dean couldn't recall much of the first visit—he'd been, he was sure, drunk at the time—but the September calling stuck in his mind just fine.

 

It wasn't a long visit. Ben was asleep upstairs when Dean heard the rustle of wings in the corner of the living room, under the low sound of the game show he was half-watching, and the sound startled him.

 

“You couldn't knock?” he hissed, recovering, shifting forward onto the edge of the couch. Castiel, in that same old coat, in the shadow cast by the bookshelf, didn't say anything. “Or mention you were gonna drop by?”

 

“My apologies,” Castiel said. “Hello, Dean.”

 

Dean slid his eyes over him. He was blocked out and cut up by the dark and his eyes were hidden and Dean hoped he wouldn't come any closer into the room—it felt as if he'd shatter something, if he did.

 

“You want a drink?” Dean asked, standing, rounding the couch to go into the kitchen.

 

“No, thank you.”

 

He opened the fridge, felt the cold yellow light on his legs, and took out a beer for himself and went back into the living room and Cas had not moved.

 

“Why are you here?” Dean asked, warily, sitting back down. He kept his eyes on the game show, on a woman puzzling out the answer to a question he hadn't heard. “Haven't seen you in months.”

 

“I was concerned,” Cas said, in his low quiet voice. To this day, Dean thought, it still put him in mind of earthquakes and falling towers. In his peripheral vision Dean saw him tilt his head in that _way_ of his. “I only wanted to see how you were.”

 

Dean didn't respond. He cracked open his bottle with a _pop_ and took a long drink and looked down at the rug between his knees. He'd almost thought Cas had come to ask him to leave, to drag him away, back into angels and demons and Heaven and Hell. It seemed like the kind of thing that was due to happen.

 

_How you were._ How was he? He didn't even know how to begin to answer that question.

 

“Yeah, well,” he said, opening his arms to the empty living room, the television's light murmuring on the wall. “This is how I am.”

 

He glanced at the half-figure in the corner, all edges and bits—a sleeve of that ragged coat, a sliver of blue eye, a cast of jaw and mouth. He could see the question there, poised. _I didn't mean all this,_ it was, _I meant, how are you? How are you about—_

 

But Castiel didn't ask that. He breathed it back in and said, “I'm glad.” Which could have meant all kinds of things, Dean thought— _I'm glad you're content, I'm glad you're safe, I'm glad you've gotten away from everything I represent,_ so Dean took all of those meanings and let it lie, and knew that his friend wasn't satisfied, standing there in the dark. Of all the people or creatures in the universe Castiel was probably the only person who even began to understand how _not_ -content, how _not-_ away he was, the only person who knew not to press the issue.

 

He left, then, left Dean with a half-finished game show that had ceased to make sense to him, and he fell asleep with a warm empty bottle in his hand to the muttering of an infomercial at two in the morning.

 

Dean hadn't seen him since then, and he tried to tell himself that he most certainly did _not_ miss him. Missing Castiel implied missing something else and he could not—could not think about that. Not here. Not now.

* * *

 

It only occurred to him in bad moments, raw moments, that even though October was shaping up to be kind, he had only to sit in silence for an instant to realise that he wasn't getting better, though everything around him was. Everything was still painted and soaked and dripping with his loss.

 

Black May, dull June, bright July and golden August, washed over with blue, blue grief. The numbness that still clung to his insides. He'd blanked out so much of his first few weeks in this house, could hardly even remember the night he'd arrived save for the two red words on Lisa's calendar. Things were good now, but they hadn't been for a long time. For weeks he'd intruded on the Braeden hospitality, a wreck, drinking, slumped on the couch; seeing Ben in the garage where he'd shrouded up the Impala—not even touching it, but too close, somehow—the pointless rage he'd felt—his anger, his bitter silence towards Lisa when she'd asked him what he needed from her. How could she possibly assume to have the godlike power that would bring him the thing he needed?

 

All of that, for the most part, was gone, pushed beneath layers and layers of defenses, normalcy, papered over in calendar pages, but the blue grief still existed. Bad, raw fingers figuring out the chinks in his armour. He was never going to be safe from them. He knew enough about death to know that.

 

And Sam was dead. Sam, fighting back the Devil, had jumped into the Pit of Hell before Dean's eyes and the ground had swallowed him up and Dean had come here, breaking the speed limit to outrun what he'd seen. Ben and Lisa knew, or knew in part, that Dean's brother had passed away, that Dean's brother had been his life, his world, his everything, that Dean was broken and needed a place to heal. They'd let him in, foolishly, let him in and loved him, and they didn't talk about Sam, they didn't ask about Sam. He was better now, in October. He could smile; Lisa made him laugh. But he wasn't whole just yet. There was still that blackness behind his eyes, the overwhelming sadness that lifted itself up under his good moods the moment he fell quiet enough to entertain it.

 

He missed Sam so vividly, so constantly, that he was sure—on construction sites, out for dinner, sitting watching the game with Lisa—that people could see it, painted on his body, in the slowness of his heartbeat. It was his shadow, his second inner skin. He knew how to bury it in daylight, enough to function, but it always came out somehow, seeping through the cracks in him, staining his sleep, his dreams, his instants of joy. A following thing sewn onto his heels.

 

_What can I do to help?_ Lisa asked him, a while after he came. _Can you pry open Hell?_ he wanted to ask her. _With your superhuman strength of heart, can you do that?_ He knew she loved him. It wasn't even a question he asked himself. It was a fact, like her calendar, like her white teeth. He loved her too. And in her was everything, everything Sam had wanted for him, all the means in the world to move on as he'd promised he would. But he couldn't.

 

He tried so hard, with every bit of himself, every day, but he couldn't.

* * *

 

“Fire and Rain” woke him, at six o'clock on a Thursday morning, as usual. James Taylor's voice muffled and tinny inside the alarm clock speakers. Dean groped outward for the button in the black and smacked at it, clamming the music up, keeping his eyes closed.

 

Next to him, in the cool soft dark, Lisa's body stirred and Dean felt the weight of her head pushed up against his neck, her knee against his thigh, her hand over his heart. She hummed a waking noise in her throat and rolled over, away from him.

 

“Morning,” he heard her mumble, behind his eyelids. She fell still again, curling into her extra half-hour of sleep before her own alarm went off, and Dean lay on his back.

 

This was his day, every day, save weekends. Up at six to shower and shave and fill a blue plastic travel mug with coffee and start up the truck in the driveway. He knew, now, to avoid the step that creaked and always seemed to wake Ben, knew that seeing the kid on his paper route on his red bike was the punctuation of his morning. He would work until work was over and then come home to Lisa and her son and they would eat, and they would rest, and then he would sleep until it was six o'clock again and day again and everything was becoming the same. He liked the sameness. Rather, he liked that it required nothing of him—that he could operate in it without being anyone in particular. If he dwelled too much on what he was actually doing, what he _could_ be doing, who he was when he was not this, he'd fall apart.

 

He lay there, for a while. The day before they'd decorated the house for Halloween and everything still smelled of cardboard and dust and that strange, unidentifiable scent of this month, somewhere between candy wrappers and pie crust. He felt the morning on the floor, under the window, pale grey, the dampness on the roof.

 

He was working on a renovation in town, in some old hotel that was being restored. They probably wouldn't need him for the entire day; dimly he recalled that the weather was supposed to turn nasty early in the afternoon and that would shoot down his work outside on the scaffolds. He could come home early, make dinner for Lisa for a change.

 

He breathed, feeling the comforter rise and fall with his chest, the satin cling of Lisa's nightgown against his arm. Everything was so simple, so calm. He could lie here for hours if he didn't have somewhere to be.

 

Carefully, he sat up and got out of bed. His feet made soft noises on the floor. This was the trick—to move gently, to stir nothing in his mind. He was getting good at this, at pushing himself into each individual second that passed, at keeping the badness down.

 

Dean shaved in the mirror and went downstairs and passed the calendar whose pages lifted and fell as he went, and he grabbed something that looked relatively like breakfast from the pantry.

 

Soon Lisa would be getting up and driving into town to the yoga studio, and Ben would be getting up to catch his bus to school. Dean stood in the kitchen, body snug in the round of the counter, one hand around his coffee mug, cold grey light on the linoleum floor. They all had their places to go; they all had their day to see through, and all of it was the same.

 

He gathered his keys up off the dish in the middle of the table and as he moved across the floor in his work boots the calendar shifted in his wake and its pages fell, down, slapping open to the green shade of the month of May, and Dean stopped halfway into the hall.

 

He came back in, paused in front of the white door, looking at the filled-in columns and the round shapes of Lisa's writing. Birds were singing somewhere on the fence outside at his back. There he was—two red words in ballpoint pen, reduced to his own arrival. The bookend of everything that had come before.

 

Dean pushed the pages back up, imagining fiercely that the lump in his throat meant he had swallowed something wrong. His breath hurt a little in his chest. It took two separate tries in the cold to turn the truck's ignition on, and he pulled into the road with white knuckles.

* * *

 

Lisa called him as he was packing up for the day, and he ducked inside the lobby of the hotel to answer, hovering in the doorway with the phone pressed against his shoulder. Up above on the scaffolds behind the plastic sheeting everyone was collecting their things; the flat rectangle of grey road he could see was already drumming with rain, wavering and pockmarking, manhole cover turning black.

 

“Hey.”

 

“Hey, you,” she said, and he smiled, nodding at Sid as he came in through the doorway. “Finishing up?”

 

“Yeah.” The tarps on the floor rustled under his boots as he fumbled on a work table for his toolbox, the old-fashioned red metal kind that made him feel as if he were back in the fifties in some ridiculous Norman Rockwell painting. He could hear the rain on her end, too, an echo past windows and walls. “What's up, you need something?”

 

She hummed dissent in her comfortable way. “Just reminding you to be careful coming home.”

 

He smiled, softly, down into his toolbox. “I know.”

 

Sid clapped him on the back as he went out again and Dean shifted the phone to his other ear, dropping the lid of his toolbox and latching it closed.

 

“Hey, you know, I think the Millers are coming home with the baby today,” Lisa said.

 

“No kidding?”

 

He could picture her, curled up on the couch, the window open just the littlest bit to let the cool air and the sound of the rain in, _Women's Health_ open over her leg, looking out across the street at the Miller house. They were an ostentatious family, overly friendly, and had left little announcements in everyone's mailbox as soon as they'd learned that Mrs. Miller was expecting a baby boy. Ever the supportive friend, Lisa had tacked it up onto the fridge with a bottle-cap magnet, and the little blue paper balloons stared cheerfully out at Dean every time he opened the door.

 

“Hope they drive safe too,” he said.

 

“Mm.”

 

Dean stood there in the lobby, holding his phone, listening to her be silent. He heard a page of her magazine turn before she said, “Well, like I said, be safe.”

 

“I can, ah, I can make dinner tonight if you want.”

 

He could hear her grin all the way across town. “Aw. My man.”

 

“I'll see you soon.”

 

“Mm-hmm.”

 

He put his cell phone in his pocket.

 

This was how they were—his gratitude for it rushed into his bones every time he stopped to think about it. The kind of people who could be silent a little on the phone together, wish each other safe driving. He picked up his toolbox and ducked out into the rain and held his hand up over his eyes as he went down the busy street to his truck, feeling washed-out and invisible and quietly included in the parade of black umbrellas further down, the ring of door-bells around the corner on the square. He thought of the Millers' baby and felt it take residence in his heartbeat. Another layer of normalcy—life going on.

 

Dean got into his truck and sat there a moment, breathing, remembering his trick. He divided the next fifteen minutes into sections of road and stoplights and entered them, carefully, when he turned the key in the ignition. The next fifteen minutes could be blank and safe. This was how he kept himself together.

 

He hydroplaned a little, getting into the flow of traffic. But he got home alright.

* * *

 

The Millers with their newborn baby, thank goodness, also must have driven safely, because Lisa opened the front door that evening to peer out across the street through the rain.

 

Dean was in the kitchen stirring spaghetti sauce with a wooden spoon, and Ben was upstairs watching something on TV. Dean looked at the green digital clock on the stove every now and then, dividing up the remainder of the day, puzzling out how to safely move through it.

 

“Should we take them something?” Lisa called, down the hall to him. “I think we should take them something. For the baby.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“Oh, you know.”

 

Dean didn't know, but she didn't offer any suggestions, either. He left the sauce simmering in the pot and went down the hall to her, her figure encased in the box of the doorway, and he slipped an arm around her waist.

 

The October air smelled cool and fresh and indeed, across the street, the Millers' red SUV was backed carefully into the driveway, and there was the swell of an umbrella hovering near the passenger side. It was hard to see, but they watched, mist on their faces, as Brenda Miller stepped out, baby carrier tucked over her arm—distantly the soft pink suggestion of the child, Tim Miller's arm coming round her, the umbrella dipping and waving.

 

Dean glanced down at Lisa, who was smiling a little, leaning into him, and then looked back. They were going into the house, Tim bending down to fumble with the keys, and Lisa drew away, satisfied that the family was alright, but Dean lingered in the open door.

 

He felt very cold, suddenly, watching them, though the air outside was far from chill. The loud rain, the sound of Lisa calling up to Ben, very far away, or separated from him by walls and walls. The Miller door opened, the family shuffled inside. A last glimpse of the plastic of the baby carrier before the door closed in distant silence and the lump in his throat was back, his arms felt heavy—something was jarred in the careful organisation of minutes in his head, though he hadn't meant to disturb it.

 

He closed the door against the sound of the downpour and locked it, leaned a little against it, brow furrowed, trying to place what felt wrong—a burgeoning something climbing up into the space behind his eyes, with umbrella fingers, baby-smell.

* * *

* * *

 

_Lawrence, Kansas_

_May 5_ _th_ _, 1983_

 

It seemed to take forever to get home.

 

Dean sat in the back seat, face in his hand, elbow wedged against the window, watching the streets and the houses and the trees go by. At least Mommy was sitting in the back seat with him, one hand on his knee and the other holding tight to the baby carrier, and sometimes he looked at her, at the squirmy little bundle of blankets and embroidered hat that was the new baby.

 

He was happy—just happy. Tired, because he'd spent all morning and afternoon in the stiff-smelling hallways of the hospital, sitting in a hard plastic chair kicking his feet waiting for Mommy to get dressed, get checked out, smile at all the doctors and nurses and hold the new baby in her arms. Daddy was all fuss about her, offering to hold everything, but Mommy was all smiles, all adoring looks at the squirmy little bundle.

 

While Dean sprawled out on the hard chair waiting and waiting and waiting, he looked at the hospital bed, all the wires and tubes and blinking lights, listened to the squeak of wheelchairs outside the room, but most of all he looked at the squirmy little bundle that Mommy called _Sam, Sammy, hi baby, hi buddy._ While she was waiting for something to happen at the big desk down the hall she bent down in front of Dean and showed him the baby, the red screwed-up face with eyes that weren't even open. “Say hi to your big brother, Sammy,” she cooed, and the baby didn't do anything except wave his little fists around, and Dean thought, in his sullen bored and waiting mood, that this baby was kind of lame if all it did was kick its little feet and wave its little fists.

 

But then they left, all together, everything just fine, Mommy carrying the squirmy little bundle in his carrier, and Dean peered in as they walked into the elevators and down the halls and out the doors into the bright almost-summer. _Sammy_ didn't look like much of anything except a heavy little head, a few whisps of dark hair, squinty eyes and those little red waving fists, and the rest of him was blankets and the soft blue hat that was coming off his heavy little head.

 

They got into Daddy's car, and Mommy sat in the back seat with Dean, and put her hand on his knee.

 

It took forever to get home; Dean thought it took at least a whole year. But he felt a little better now, out of that stale-smelling hospital, in the comfortable familiar leather seats that were sticky in the heat, with his Mommy's hand on his knee. He unwedged his elbow from the window and leaned across the seat to look into the carrier again. The squirmy bundle's squinty eyes were open now, and they were the biggest eyes Dean had ever seen—the size of nickels, at least. They were the kind of green colour that reminded him of the trumpet vine on the fence of the old lady down the street, the sun on that trumpet vine, the soft sun on the leaves he pulled off whenever he rode his tricycle past and scattered in his wake.

 

“Say hi to your big brother, Sammy,” Mommy said again, and with her hand she ruffled Dean's hair a little, pulled him against her shoulder. “Say hi, Dean.”

 

“Hi,” Dean said, feeling stupid. The squirmy bundle couldn't even talk. But it looked at him, big trumpet-vine nickel-eyes, and tiny red-faced squinty Sammy blew a little bubble and waved his little fists and made a little sound and Dean smiled, reached gently in to the carrier to touch the soft flat baby-nose, and Mommy laughed a little in her throat, and sounded like wind-chimes.

 

When they finally, finally got home, after two years, at least, Daddy pulled into the driveway and Mommy kissed Dean's forehead and said, “Do you want to carry him in, sweetie?” And by then Dean thought that the squirmy bundle was pretty alright, so he said, “Yeah,” and Mommy smiled again and helped him put the handle of the carrier over his arm.

 

It was heavy; Sammy was baby-fat. His eyes were squinted up again in the bright late-afternoon light and Dean walked very slowly, very carefully, up towards the open door where Daddy was standing, and Mommy walked behind him with her hand on his shoulder.

 

Sammy yawned when they got inside, as Daddy went to turn on the lights, and Dean stood inside the door looking down at him. He closed his squinty eyes and Dean carefully reached down and pushed his little soft embroidered hat back onto his heavy head, and looked at the blue letters, _S A M._ Sam, Sammy, baby, buddy.

 

He thought it was a pretty alright name, really, for a pretty alright little brother.

* * *

* * *

 

“Dean, the sauce is burning,” Lisa called, breaking into him, abruptly—the memory-fingers scurried back into the crack they'd pulled up from—and he looked down the hall at her, holding the red-stained wooden spoon. It took a moment for her to come into focus.

 

“Sorry,” he said, feeling damp and weighed-down, as if he were a long way back inside his skull. “Sorry.”


	2. II

In the last two months Dean hadn't had a particularly difficult time of getting to sleep; construction was tiring work, and though he always seemed to balk a moment on the verge of dropping off, remembering the possibility of nightmares, he always made it into rest eventually. Lisa had noted a few weeks ago that he hadn't had a bad dream for a good long time. She'd touched his face and smiled the smile that meant _I'm so glad you're getting better. You deserve it._

 

He believed her—or had. It was well past one in the morning on that Thursday night and he could not for the life of him get his eyes to stay shut.

 

He focused on the silent blades of the ceiling fan, circling in and out of street-light, cut-up shadows flipping round and round; he focused on the weight of Lisa's body next to his, her spine pressed against his arm. Her black hair a liquid ink spill on the pillow, her dark arm stark against the white comforter. The gentle pulse of the thinning rain on the roof. There was a trick Lisa had taught him—some yoga thing—a breathing technique, inhale for a count of five, exhale for another five, over and over until the muscles relaxed, but he'd been counting the number five in his head for hours and it didn't seem to be working. He was tense, and he didn't know why.

 

Well, that was a lie. He knew exactly why.

 

Frustrated, Dean turned over in bed, separating himself from the touch of Lisa's back. He pushed one arm beneath the pillow and closed his eyes, willing his mind to blank out, to move through a white space instead of from thought to thought to thought of—

 

The floor was cold under his bare feet when he got up, rounded the bed, went to the window. He cast a backwards glance at Lisa to be sure he hadn't woken her and then lifted the gauzy curtain with one finger and peered through the crape myrtle tree and the rain to the Miller house.

 

It was dark, shuttered up, obscured by the night. The streetlamp that stood vigil above their lawn illuminated only a bit of concrete, grass drooping, the white and black address number painted onto the curb.

 

He leaned against the windowsill, wood biting into his hip, and looked. Looked hard.

 

Dean hadn't had a memory that vivid in—well, since Hell, if he was being honest. After Hell there had been nightmares in droves of everything he'd done, everything that had been done to him. The smell of scorched flesh had choked him for months. The sound of slithering chains or the snap of shackles and handcuffs had made him dizzy and sick and he'd gotten flashes—only flashes, really—scraps of colour and light and sound, at random, and the bone-scraping feeling of nails on a chalkboard all over him. But those had gone—they'd gone a while back, thank God, too stifled and disrupted by the chaos and calamity of the Apocalypse to burden him anymore. He'd had other things to dream about then.

 

But this—this was different.

 

A brief glimpse of light in the Miller house. The baby was probably awake. He thought of Lisa smiling at their rust-gabled house, the new happy family, and swallowed hard.

 

He hadn't even _known_ anything could be remembered like that. He didn't think it was possible to get sucked into a memory to the point where he'd idled at the door and let the spaghetti sauce burn and _felt_ the Kansas sunlight, the baby-smell of his mother's hands, prickling and blossoming behind his eyes as if he'd stared too hard at a bursting firework.

 

Surely that was something _cinematic._ That was the kind of thing you saw in movies, a shift into the past triggered by a barking dog or a passing woman. It didn't happen in real life.

 

Yet it had happened. He could still, faintly—even after the rain had washed the house clean and the images been gone for hours—smell the hospital on his mother's clothes, and feel the ghost of a hand in his hair, and imagine with perfect clarity the soft fragile feeling of Sam's baby-skin beneath his fingers.

 

This was troubling.

 

He frowned at the Miller house, watched the flash of light die back down. Slowly the darkness closed back in over its roof and his view pulled in to the glow of the streetlamp and everything it touched and nothing more, an isolated island of night.

 

He couldn't afford this. He had a job, something of a family, the burgeoning beginnings of a real life here, intruded on only once or twice by Castiel and warded firmly against anything that made his heart long backwards towards what once had been. He'd perfected his tricks of getting through the day without having his knees broken and his legs crippled by grief—the safe practise of dividing things into hours and minutes and getting through each one at a time, making himself busy when he found himself in too much quiet, quashing and smashing and locking up anything that resembled what he'd left behind. Or resembled—Sam.

 

He'd taken to ferociously ignoring everything that even remotely smacked of his brother. For a long time even something as simple as a rerun of _The Good Wife_ or driving past the big white-columned public library had been enough to bring him to tears, had forced him to pull over until his breathing was normal again. He'd only let himself be truly destroyed when he was alone, after Terrible May. Now he was good at avoiding those things, pretending they didn't exist until they became flat and meaningless and he could stare them down without feeling a thing. This wasn't the healthy way to go about it, but it was the only means he had, and he couldn't afford this—couldn't afford a memory that old and bright, slipping through the cracks of his defenses, past the sentinels on his fortress walls, and freezing him up like that. It wasn't practical. It wasn't safe. He was trying so hard to get away from all that, to honour—to honour what he'd promised Sam, to live and be happy. How was it fair that it was coming back for him, now, after he'd been doing so well?

 

Tomorrow, he decided—silently, letting the curtain fall back to obscure the Miller house—he was going to work until his entire body ached and then he was going to come home and absorb himself in something, anything. Find something in the house that needed fixing. And he was going to fix that thing until he felt himself being boarded up and safe again and then he was going to sleep the whole night through and he was not going to think of baby eyes like trumpet vine, of holes in the Earth.

 

He was not going to think about that at all.

* * *

 

By the middle of the month, the hotel renovation was over, and a tiny lull in business meant that Dean was alone in the Braeden house for a good two weeks before the next contract was set to begin. He packed Ben's lunches so that Lisa wouldn't have to, raked the lawn and the backyard, cleaned everything he knew how to clean. Lisa came home around four every afternoon and he gently inserted himself into the process of making dinner, chopping onions or basting meat while she swayed her hips a little to the sound of the radio and called up to Ben to set the table.

 

It was good when she was home, when someone else was in the house. Dean could zone out just enough that the little whirls and eddies of activity that the Braedens stirred became hypnotic. It was when he was alone that things weren't as nice.

 

There simply wasn't much to _do_ in an empty place like this, and everything he did get his hands on was too far removed to engage him—golf tournaments and daytime soaps on TV didn't interest him; he was too good at solitaire for it to be any fun; he was raking the lawn too quickly for the falling leaves to keep up. When the house got too quiet and his bones began to itch he tried sitting out on the porch, nursing a beer, watching the grey October sky roll overhead, but that didn't last long, either. The occasional sound of the wind-chimes above the door only served to make him anxious.

 

Without work to do his hands were idle and so he tried to find things that needed TLC—he swept and organised the garage, careful to let his eyes slide over the shrouded mass of the Impala; he replaced the shower curtain rod in the master bathroom. One afternoon he climbed up onto the roof and picked out all the places where it had been damaged by a rare hailstorm mid-July and spent all evening fixing the busted patches until it was too dark to see and he'd missed dinner and smashed his thumbnail with a hammer as well and he went to bed feeling nervous and uneasy instead of tired, as he'd hoped.

 

He hated this feeling—as if he were on the cusp of something that was about to happen and refused to do so.

 

Dean avoided the Miller house and conversation about it like the plague. The moment the house was empty on that first day off he pulled the baby announcement off the fridge and stared at it over the trash can for a while, tracing the pre-printed words with his eyes, looking at the cheerful cut-out blue paper balloons.

 

On second thought, he shredded it, and took its remains out with old receipts and voided checks to the curb for the garbage truck to take away.

 

If Lisa noticed its absence, she said nothing. She knew something was wrong, in her own way—Dean knew that much. It was impossible to hide anything from her for long. Though he couldn't recall it, he knew that at some point he must have told her everything—or enough—probably in one of his drunken stupors in dull June. Even if she couldn't pinpoint what was wrong with him now, she probably knew what it all led back to. The same thing everything led back to, all the melancholy and the alcohol and the silence: someone dying in a graveyard in the blackness of May. And it wasn't, she'd told him, her place to assume that she knew anything real about it.

 

Sometimes he almost wished she would ask him about it. Sit him down and say _tell me about Sam._ He knew that if that happened he wouldn't be able to breathe a word, because there was too much to tell, and too much he had to keep for himself—things neither she nor anyone else would be able to understand and appreciate about what they had been to one another, what they'd seen and done, the span of their lives. But still he almost wished that _someone_ would ask the question, would give him permission to entertain the image of his brother's face in his mind again. He didn't have the strength to do it on his own.

 

Except now Sam's face was coming unbidden. The memory-fingers were still twitching at the back of his skull though he fought them back with everything he had.

 

And he managed to stave them off until work came back, and when it did come back he could have kissed someone for joy. The site was in a housing development only ten minutes away and when he arrived on the first day, a week out from November, the smell of turned earth and the rattle and buzz of machinery enveloped him like a pair of warm arms and he lost himself happily in them, quietly slipping behind his goggles and hard hat and work gloves and pushing himself into the blocked-out hours of his labour where nothing—not even memory—could find him.

 

He worked and sweated even in the growing autumn chill and kept on schedule and drove home safely, even in the rain. For a while he even thought that he had conquered it, that that scrap and smash of dream-vision had been a one-time thing, until he came home the day before Halloween to Castiel sitting on the Braeden porch, waiting for him.

* * *

 

He paused on the steps, looking under the roof to the man sitting on the porch swing, neatly folded up in his suit and coat as always and his hands on his knees.

 

Dean glanced over his shoulder; the driveway was empty. Some PTA meeting at Ben's school. Lisa wouldn't be back for a few more hours at least. He turned back, slowly, leaning down to set his toolbox on the wooden stair.

 

“What are you doing here?” he said.

 

Cas looked at him, but only briefly, and then turned his eyes away, almost as if the sight of him hurt—as if he were too bright to look at, or too dark.

 

“I only came to say hello,” Castiel replied. His face was turned to the Miller house.

 

“Okay,” Dean said, feeling hot and anxious in his throat. “Hi. Now go.”

 

Castiel's brow furrowed. “I'm sorry?”

 

“Please go,” Dean said, ducking his head, pushing a hand into his back pocket for the house keys. Didn't Cas know how bad this was? Showing up out of nowhere, a stranger to everyone in the neighbourhood, sitting on his porch waiting for him? Sitting there in the pale light like an amalgam of everything Dean had been trying his goddamndest to push away for the last two weeks?

 

Cas stood up, holding his hands out gently, mollifying. “I didn't mean to upset you, Dean—”

 

“I know, I know, just—just please go. I can't talk to you right now.”

 

Dean opened the door, leaving his toolbox on the porch.

 

Cas, of course, followed.

 

And Dean didn't have the heart to tell his friend to leave. He went into the kitchen, shedding his jacket and leaving it draped over a chair, and he could feel Cas lingering in the hallway. Probably squinting at Ben's baby pictures on the wall. Dean tried to stay neutral, to flatten himself, to find the safe spot in the unexpected disturbance of his separated hours.

 

“You know, most people would agree it's rude to show up unannounced,” he said, over his shoulder to Cas in the hallway.

 

“My mistake.”

 

“Do you want a drink?”

 

“You asked me that last time I came.”

 

“Well, do you?”

 

“I might as well.”

 

Dean caught up the necks of two bottles in his fingers and steeled himself, went down the hall again and pushed one into Cas' hand in passing.

 

“You seem to be doing better,” Cas said, abruptly, as Dean was sitting down on the edge of the coffee table, and Dean paused—looked up at him.

 

“Really,” he said.

 

Cas nodded, holding the bottle as if it were something obscure and electronic he wasn't sure about using. Tentatively he sat down on the arm of the couch, his coat bunching up beneath him, and opened it, toying with the cap in his hand. It rolled, its rivets catching between his fingers.

 

“Are you?” Cas said, squinting at him, his mouth held in a line of concern. “Doing better?”

 

Dean debated, for a moment, whether or not to tell him. Because on the whole, he supposed he was doing better—if _better_ meant _better at pretending to be alright._ Dean was sure that at a certain point the _pretending_ would simply become true. But for now he was only barely verging on what he'd call _okay,_ and there were those—things in the back of his skull, and the memory in the doorway, and he wondered if he should say anything about it at all but before his mind could make itself up his mouth was saying “Yeah, I think I am,” and that was that.

 

Cas didn't say anything. He didn't look particularly convinced, but that didn't surprise Dean. Besides Lisa, Cas was probably the next best person at seeing plainly when he wasn't feeling quite right. But—like Lisa—he was too polite to mention it.

 

There was a long silence. Cas took a drink and made a small face.

 

“How've you been?” Dean asked, clearing his throat, feeling suddenly desperate to hear about someone other than himself. He looked into the neck of his bottle rather than anywhere else. It was narrow and dark and cool and safe. “How's, uh—how's the Upstairs?”

 

Cas sighed, shifted. “A mess,” he said. “The angels are very—divided. A few of them gunning for the top. There might be fighting soon.”

 

Dean glanced up at him; he did look a little ragged around the edges, now that he thought about it. A little beaten. “You mean, like. Civil war-type fighting?”

 

Cas nodded.

 

“And you're taking time out of weapons training to come check on me?”

 

The angel looked at him, and though his face was practically useless for emotion on the best of days, now it was very clearly surprised.

 

“Of course,” he said. “You're my friend, Dean. I find time for you.”

 

“You don't need to do that.”

 

“I want to.”

 

Dean swallowed hard, looked back into his bottle. His shoulders felt tight from working and heavy with the weight of Castiel's presence in the room. He could tell him—he could tell him what he'd seen, what had been triggered—someone willing to abandon a burgeoning war to see how he was faring would only deserve to know something like that, really. And maybe he could help, in some way, with that two-finger trick he'd always used, back when—

 

“It's—it's not ideal to have you showing up here, Cas,” he said, hating himself immediately. He didn't want to send Cas away, not really, but all the warning bells were going off in his head that this was the old life getting too close, and he wanted to bat it back before it took hold again. “I mean—it's nice to see you, it really is—I miss you like hell, but—”

 

Castiel's head dropped and Dean mentally smacked himself. Disappointing Cas was high up on his list of things that made him feel terrible inside. But Cas nodded, and gave him a soft smile.

 

“The Braedens,” he said. “I understand. And this is their home, I—I shouldn't be intruding.”

 

“It's not _intruding_ , I just—it's just not ideal.”

 

God, but he sounded like someone's horrible boss, telling them that their work was _not up to par,_ or someone's horrible lawyer telling them that their prospects were _not looking good._ Like some dick in a suit on TV. But Cas stood up, proffering his half-empty bottle, and Dean took it, set it down beside him on the coffee table.

 

“I won't come unannounced next time,” Cas said, his lips pulling up sadly. Dean stood, too, avoiding his eyes. “You know—if you need me you can call me down.”

 

“Wouldn't want to pull you off the battlefield.”

 

“I care more about you than any war I'd be fighting,” Cas said softly. His hand came up and his fingertips brushed softly against Dean's shoulder, over the place where the mark of his touch had once been, and then came back down by his side, a loose fist against his coat. “I know you don't have many people to talk to about—well. Everything.”

 

That word tumbled out of his mouth like an atom bomb and Dean flinched, closed his eyes for an instant.

 

“Yeah,” he said.

 

“I'll go. I'll be watching every now and then, if you need me,” Castiel said, and Dean looked down at their boots, toe to toe on the hardwood floor. He didn't think he could muster the courage to look the angel in the eye, not with that memory knocking on the back of his tongue. “Dean?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Be happy,” the angel said, and when Dean looked up from the gleam of Castiel's black shoes he was gone, and the house was empty again, and the front door still ajar.

 

He felt a pinching in his gut, and moved to close the door. It felt too cold underneath his hand, almost shockingly so, and he pushed his palm against his jeans as if to scrub the feeling off. On the porch the swing-chair was moving gently in an absent breeze, in the wake of the angel leaving him.

 

_I'll be watching._

 

Goddammit, Cas. Something, now, in the newly-quiet house, in the front room, was moving in the back of his head like a worm beginning to push from a corpse's flesh and this time it was fingers of porcelain coming up through the crack, fingerprints dusted in ash, _goddammit, Cas, why did you have to say that?_ and he felt sick. He felt sick.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Lawrence, Kansas_

_November 2_ _nd_ _, 1983_

 

Bedtime was eight-thirty, because Daddy didn't believe in sending children to bed right after dinner—or at least that was what he said.

 

There was an order in which things had to be done, when you were four years old and getting ready for bed, and Dean knew the order as well as he knew just about anything.

 

It went like this: Mommy called him upstairs every night at seven-thirty to kiss Sammy goodnight—Sammy, who was bigger now, and was just learning to smile. And then he went into his bedroom and got into his PJs and put his toys away, his Tonka trucks and his Play Family fire engine, and when his floor was clean he went downstairs to eat a bedtime snack on the couch tucked up against Daddy's arm while Daddy watched the news or something grainy in which invisible people laughed and nothing ever truly seemed to happen. And after Sammy was asleep in his crib Mommy came down, and by then it was eight-thirty, and Dean climbed the stairs after her, past the sound of Sammy's mobile turning gently above him, and they crossed his clean floor and he jumped into bed and the mattress bounced beneath his body. Mommy kissed his forehead and read him a story that always, somehow, seemed new, each time she read it, and she did all the voices, because she knew he liked them.

 

Daddy came up and ruffled his hair and gruffly said “Goodnight, buddy,” and then Mommy turned out the light and hummed a lullaby, a Beatles song, he knew—and he was proud of that, that he had a Mommy who hummed Beatles songs like that—and she sat with him until he got drowsy and just before she left him she whispered, “Goodnight, Dean. Angels are watching over you.”

 

This was how he got ready for bed, and he knew it better than he knew most things.

 

It was Sammy's half-birthday—he knew that, too, because Mommy had brought home cupcakes, even though Sammy was still too tiny to eat them. She'd even lit a candle in one and put it on the table in front of the baby's high-chair and Sammy had clapped his hands and kicked his feet and Dean had blown it out for him, because he was too tiny to eat cupcakes and too tiny to blow out candles, too.

 

Dean liked Sammy. He liked that he could stick one finger into the baby's hand and Sammy would clamp down on it or pull it into his mouth and drool on it; it made him laugh. He liked that he could lie on the floor with the baby and make faces at him and Sammy would smile and make little sounds and squirm. No one else on the street had a little brother like that.

 

And though he was a little bigger now, he still had little-baby eyes, big nickel-sized eyes that weren't so much green anymore as they were the colour of the lawn at the end of the summer, when it was baked and crunchy under Dean's sneakers, and it smelled like grasshoppers and sunshine—those were Sammy's eyes. At preschool, at the beginning of the year, Dean's teacher had instructed them to draw a picture of their family, and he'd overturned an entire box of crayons trying to find one that satisfied him, for Sammy's button-eyes. But Crayola, apparently, didn't have a shade for dead grass, so he'd used green instead, and his teacher had hung the picture up on the wall with all the others—Mommy and Daddy with stick-legs, and Sammy a blob and two green dots in Mommy's stick-arms, and Dean, stick-boy, holding a red baseball bat.

 

He hoped he could have another cupcake for his snack. It was, after all, Sammy's half-birthday.

 

But now it was seven-thirty—time for Sammy to go to sleep—bedtime beginning. Just like every other night, Dean went up the stairs on all fours, the faster to get to Mommy at the top.

 

Mommy scooped him up at the top of the stairs and he wrapped his legs around her, pushing his face into her sweet-smelling hair. She hummed and smiled and turned down the hall towards the dim nursery and he yawned against her neck, felt her hand pat against his side.

 

“Come on. Let's say goodnight to your brother.”

 

Sammy was looking at him through the bars of his crib and as soon as his feet touched down on the colourful rug on the floor Dean ran across the room, grabbed the smooth wood in his hands, peered in.

 

In the dimness Sammy's eyes were darker, liquid. He wriggled a little, looking up at Dean, and Dean smiled—leaned forward to kiss his little heavy head. He smelled like milk and baby shampoo, just like every night, and his big, big eyes followed Dean as he stood back up, looked straight at him.

 

“'Night, Sam.”

 

He felt Mommy at his back, the softness of her nightgown as she bent to smoothe Sammy's whispy baby-hair. “Goodnight, love,” she said—cooed—and Sammy burbled a little and reached for his toes.

 

He didn't seem very sleepy. Not as sleepy as Dean, at least. Daddy came in to say his own goodnight and Dean jumped into his arms to be carried back downstairs for his maybe-cupcake snack and partway down the stairs he was yawning, and before he knew it he was back upstairs again, tucked against Mommy's side, moving down the hall past Sammy's turning mobile, halfway to dreams already.

 

Daddy said goodnight and Mommy hummed her lullaby and Dean was already letting the glow of the nightlight fuzz and blur out before his eyes by the time she whispered, “Goodnight, Dean. Angels are watching over you.”

 

He must have fallen asleep quite quickly after that, tucked safely into his bed, the smell of Mommy's soft hands floating around his head, the smell of Sammy's baby-skin too, like a cloud of good things guarding him from nightmares. He felt his hands uncurl around his blankets and was gone.

* * *

 

When he woke, it was because of the smell—not a good smell. It smelled like the time Mommy had been sick and Daddy hadn't thought to clean out the refrigerator while she was getting better and she'd opened the door one morning and all the eggs had gone rotten.

 

Dean opened his eyes and lay still.

 

It was hard to see anything that the nightlight didn't touch. Just the familiar shadows of his room—the jutting corner of the baseboard—the gleam of his closet doorknob. The smell pushed against his face as if blown into it by something passing by and then faded, faded, just a little bit at a time, until it was gone.

 

Dean sat up, rubbing his face. Everything was quiet. Even the clock above his bed was quiet. He listened hard, as hard as he could—but there was only a very small noise from down the hall, in Mommy and Daddy's room, that sounded like the baby monitor.

 

Hesitant, he lay back down, balling the blankets in his fists and pulling them close to his face. The smell was still there—weird, at the back of his nose—and the blankets smelled better than the air. He curled up a little, thinking suddenly of monsters in the closet or under the bed, monsters who smelled like rotten eggs. Mommy had told him once that everyone knew that monsters were scared of blankets. He pulled them tighter around him for protection, found the silhouette of the porcelain angel statue on the shelf next to his window and fixed on it—surrounded by the dim green glow of the nightlight like a hulking halo. Monsters were scared of blankets and angels. He knew that. Everyone knew that.

 

Dean breathed through the blanket. There were very faint footsteps in the hallway—Mommy footsteps; he knew those. They were different from Daddy footsteps. If Mommy was awake then everything was okay.

 

He sighed, turned over, pulled the blankets with him. Closed his eyes.

 

There was the murmur of Mommy's voice back down the hall near Sammy's room and he listened, pretending it was her humming lullaby. Then he heard her footsteps moving back, towards the stairs. Everything was fine if Mommy was awake. She was probably going to get a glass of water.

 

Silence, again—deep silence—not even the sound of the clock above his bed. Which was weird, he thought, feeling himself drifting back into wakefulness—he'd fallen asleep to the sound of it ticking and now it was stopped.

 

Dean sat up, twisted, looked at the plasticine face of the clock above his bed in the dim green nightlight. The hands weren't moving. They were stuck, but he didn't know the time at which they'd stuck; he was only four, after all. Mommy hadn't taught him how to tell time yet.

 

Breathing, blanket bunched up over his hands, he listened, smelled that awful smell, too afraid to step out of bed lest a monster's hand snatch at his ankles from underneath. He turned his head a little, the better to see the angel on his shelf, but before it could come into focus there was the loud noise of something hitting the stairs—

 

“Sammy! Sammy!”

 

But that was Mommy's voice—that was Mommy hurtling up the stairs—Dean froze, kneeling in his bed, feeling his heart begin to beat beat beat like a toy drum inside his chest—

 

And then Mommy did something that startled him.

 

Mommy screamed.

 

Dean jumped, heart beat-beat-beating, and he threw his blanket aside—monsters or no monsters—and pushed himself down onto the floor, scurrying away from the darkness beneath the bed, stopping short at his doorway and grabbing onto the jamb. Downstairs, a loud thud, and Daddy shouting “Mary!” And Mary was Mommy's name—he knew that like he knew all the other things—

 

Daddy was a big black blur in the darkness, coming up the stairs, and he tore past Dean's room towards the nursery where everything was shadowed and still and no sound came from anywhere except from the mass of him. He disappeared inside and Dean crept into the hallway, clinging to the doorjamb with one hand, heart thump-thump-thumping. He was ready to dash back into the safety of his blankets if any monsters ventured forth from the blackness of Sammy's room.

 

He whimpered, quietly, and then felt stupid for whimpering; but he clutched a fist to his mouth all the same, staring, wide-eyed. His eyes were probably bigger than Sammy's, he thought, right now.

 

He could hear Daddy's voice—mumbling inside the nursery—but he couldn't make out what he was saying. Carefully he put one more foot forward, listening—

 

“ _No! Mary!”_

 

The burst of light that erupted from Sammy's nursery was brighter than anything Dean had ever seen—brighter than the sun, even, brighter than the sun on the old lady's trumpet vine down the road, brighter than the summer on the dead grass, and he stumbled back, landed hard against the wall, heart pound-pound-pounding as if it wanted to jump out of his chest, and there began a great roaring from the room down the hall like a lion or a bear or something big and fanged—and then Daddy, tumbling out, clutching a bundle of blankets in his arms, and before Dean could even stand up straight Daddy was thrusting the bundle against his pound-pound-pounding chest and shouting, “Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Now, Dean! _Go!_ ”

 

Sammy was crying; Dean could hear him wailing even over the sound of the roar, but he didn't look down at his scrunched-up little face. He looked straight at Daddy and Daddy's face was contorted with fear and it scared Dean so badly, so immediately, that he almost started crying, too. But then Daddy pushed against his shoulder and Dean turned, tripped a little but caught himself and ran—straight towards the stairs, clutching Sammy hard against his chest, squeezing him tight. _Take your brother outside,_ outside, outside, his little heart was hammering that word against his ribs, against Sammy's face pushed against his pyjama shirt, and his feet stammered down the stairs like the rat-a-tat-tat of the toy drum too and the hardwood was slippery under his bare feet but he got to the door—he fumbled one hand free of Sammy and twisted the knob—it came open, blown back by the night wind, and he threw one glance backward up the glowing stairs for Daddy but Daddy wasn't there.

 

Then the cool dew-wet grass between his toes. Not dry and baked and crunching, not the colour of Sammy's eyes, just night-grass, cold and damp. Sammy was still crying, his little face bunched up like a crumpled piece of paper, and Dean came to a stumbling stop just outside and looked down at him.

 

“It's okay, Sammy,” he said, even though it wasn't, even though his heart was still jackhammering in him, and he didn't know if it was okay at all. He didn't know that. He turned around, looking up at the howling gleam of the nursery window—and then Daddy was there, shouting “I've got you,” and his big arms were around Dean and he was being carried towards the sidewalk and there was the sound of glass shattering, the roar exploding, and fire shot from Sammy's nursery window like something from the movies.

 

Nothing was sleepy or hazy or nightlight-glowing now. Dean felt more awake than he ever had. He wriggled out from Daddy's arms and turned to look at the house, still clutching Sammy, who was still screaming and squirming and fighting in his arms, and watched the flames cloud and belch and lick up against the side of the house.

 

Daddy herded him backwards, down off the curb, across the wet street, and Sammy's screaming was so loud and hoarse and frightened that lights were coming on all down the road, even in the house of the old lady with the trumpet vine. And when they stopped moving, finally, next to the shiny black shape of Daddy's car, a door opened somewhere and Daddy disappeared briefly into the dark towards the sound of voices and Dean looked down at Sammy again.

 

His heart was so loud and pumping so fast he thought Sammy could probably feel it against his heavy head. His tiny fists were beating harmlessly against Dean's chest and Dean adjusted him a little, the way Mommy had shown him, so that his heart wasn't beating against his head, and Sammy looked up at him with big scared baby-eyes and fisted one hand around a button on Dean's shirt.

 

“It's okay, Sammy,” Dean said, because he thought that if he didn't get Sammy to stop crying he was going to cry, too—he was going to be a big scared baby sitting on the street crying, and he didn't want to do that. He wanted Sammy to stop wailing and he wanted Mommy to come out of the house and join them, in her nightgown, with her sweet-smelling hair, and he wanted Daddy to come back and hug him, and most of all he wanted to be back in his bed waking up from a very bad dream where things smelled like rotting eggs and his house was on fire.

 

But none of that happened, and Sammy didn't stop crying.

 

Not until Dean turned a little into the streetlight and saw something dark on Sammy's lip, stuck in the corner, the way his baby food sometimes got stuck. It looked—like grape juice, or something, something dark and wet, and he remembered how Mommy used to wipe food off of Sammy's mouth, so he did that—smudged it away with his thumb until it was gone, even though his hands were shaking. And when he did that, when Sammy's little baby-mouth was clean again, then Sammy stopped screaming, and his little face unscrunched, and he looked up at Dean with his big nickel baby eyes, blackish and liquid, and held onto Dean's button real tight.

 

Firetrucks came. Daddy came back, but didn't hug him. He leaned against the car, huddled over himself, wild-eyed, and it scared Dean, seeing him look like that. So he looked at Sammy instead. He let Sammy clamp down onto his finger and pull it into his mouth and drool on it, and he let Sammy coo and burble and kick his little feet, and Dean smiled at him so that he wouldn't be scared.

 

It didn't matter that _he_ was scared. He was a big boy. He was four whole years old. What mattered was that Sammy was looking at _him,_ and not at the fire, not at the tall roiling house, or the blue smoke drifting up into the black sky. He smiled, and leaned down to rub his nose on Sammy's nose, and Sammy made a happy little noise and pulled and tugged on Dean's button until it came off in his hand and Dean picked it back out and rolled its edge up across Sammy's forehead, gently. And Sammy's big wet eyes followed it up until it was too high for him to see.

 

The firetrucks wailed and the lights went around and around and still Daddy didn't say anything. A man in a hat came across the street to talk to him but Dean wasn't listening. He was rolling the button up and down Sammy's face, tracing the smudged tear tracks on his fat little cheeks, feeling Sammy's tiny fist thump-thump-thumping, like a toy drum, against his chest, like someone knocking on a door, like someone wanting to come inside.

* * *

 

Daddy let Dean ride in the front seat, that night, as he drove in a slow crawl away from the dizzy lights and now-empty street outside their smouldering house. Dean held Sammy on his lap and watched his little face in the passing streetlights—shadow passing over glow passing over shadow. Sammy was asleep, now. It was later than Dean had ever been up before. He was getting sleepy again, against his will, but he kept his eyes open to keep them on Sammy.

 

Daddy didn't say anything. He just drove, out of the neighbourhood, past the house of the old lady with the trumpet vine, and the tires hushed and rolled over the dew-wet asphalt like someone whispering to stay quiet. He didn't drive for long; he pulled over under a glowing yellow sign and parked and said, in a strange flat voice, “Come inside, Dean.”

 

Dean gathered up Sammy's bundle and waited for Daddy to open the door and then stepped down onto the cold, cold, wet parking lot in his bare feet. When the door closed again, a black flash in the nighttime, it slammed shut with a noise that echoed down the foggy empty street.

 

The cold burnt his toes but he followed Daddy's big shape, his big ridiculous shape in his black bathrobe and slippers heading for the rectangle of light beneath the yellow sign. Dean knew where they were—it was a hotel, like the hotel they'd stayed in when he was three, and they'd gone to visit Mommy's cousin in another state.

 

The lobby was buzzing and only three lights were on, flickering over the desk, and Daddy went up to the desk while Dean stood by a chair holding Sammy in his arms. There was a TV, turned off, and some magazines like the kind Daddy read, about sports and news. He yawned, hesitated, perched on the edge of one of the chairs, and pulled Sammy's blanket back a bit. His baby brother was sound asleep, his little fists uncurled, his tiny eyelashes spread out on his cheeks. Dean didn't know if babies had dreams, but he leaned his head down a little to whisper into Sammy's soft, cool ear anyway.

 

“You better have good dreams,” he whispered. “About dinosaurs or airplanes or something.”

 

Sammy didn't respond; he just breathed in his sleep, tiny little baby breaths. Dean swallowed and looked up at Daddy, who was still talking to the man at the desk, and hoped Sammy was having the best dreams ever. If Sammy was having them, then he could have them, too.

 

After what seemed like ages Daddy came back from the desk and touched Dean's shoulder and Dean carried Sammy, heavy and limp, all the way down a dark, dark hall to a room with the number nine on it, and Daddy pushed the key into the lock and opened it up. Inside it smelled like cigarette smoke and the stuff Mommy kept under the sink to clean the floor, and when Daddy flipped on the light, there were two hard-looking beds with yellow covers and flat pillows, and Daddy walked a little ways in and then stopped—staring down at the corner of one of those hard-looking beds, and he didn't say anything at all.

 

Dean stood in the door, holding the baby. His arms were tired and his legs were sore and he wanted Mommy and he wanted to go to sleep, but he didn't want to say anything. Daddy was scaring him, standing there like that, all big and ridiculous in his black bathrobe and his slippers, like a giant who was lost, a big old giant who couldn't find his way home.

 

“Daddy,” Dean said, very quietly, finally, and Daddy turned his head a little.

 

He came back towards the door and leaned down and gently pried Sammy out of Dean's arms and Dean let them swing at his sides. They felt empty and heavy and hurt. Daddy sat down on one of the beds and rocked Sammy a little, his tiny head against Daddy's big chest, and Dean walked over to the other bed and climbed up on it, unsure, afraid.

 

“Daddy?” he said. Then he swallowed hard and tried not to be scared for just a second, just long enough to ask, “When is Mommy coming?”

 

And then Daddy looked at him, lifted his head up, and his face reminded Dean of a map of the Grand Canyon he had seen once—all marked up with deep spaces and sad cracks. It was scary, to see that. It was scary to see his mouth pressed into a dark line and his shadowy eyes glimmering and his dark line mouth not saying anything and that—that was when Dean knew, as if someone had dropped a marble into his throat and it was sliding down and landing cold and heavy in his heart, that Mommy wasn't coming to meet them at the hotel, and she wasn't coming out of their house, and she wasn't going to sit on his bed anymore to hum the lullabies she picked out all by herself.

 

He started to cry. That was all he did. He sat on that hard ugly bed in his PJs with one button missing, crying, and Daddy looked down at Sammy and maybe he cried, too. Dean couldn't see. The room and the curtains and the black mountain of man holding his little baby brother blurred and swam together all hot and smelling like salt. And, sometime, he lay down on the hard ugly bed and made the pillow wet against his face and fell asleep like that, saying her name in thin sad noises in his throat, and his arms were tired, and his legs were sore, and he wanted to go home. He just wanted to go home.

* * *

 

_December 1983_

 

Things were different when you lived in room number nine at the Super 8 Motel.

 

There were noises at night—sometimes banging on the walls down the corridor which started usually around the time the red numbers on the clock said 12:45, or else around the time the red numbers said 4:03. The ice machine clattered and clunked and dropped chunks of ice into itself every now and then and always seemed to wake Sammy up where he slept in the crib the hotel had given them. Every now and then people walked by the room, past the thin door, talking loudly and bumping into things. Sometimes it helped to put a pillow over his head, Dean found. It made the banging and the ice machine and the people quieter, at least.

 

The bed was too big for him and it was hard and lumpy, but the pillows smelled nice after a while. Most of the time he slept like he was supposed to, although it was hard when Daddy snored or when the ice machine woke Sammy up, because then he cried and cried for ages until he cried himself back to sleep again. Daddy wasn't good at getting Sammy to stop crying.

 

Nights were bad, but days were okay—they were different, too, though. Daddy didn't take Dean to preschool anymore. Daddy would get up to go to his job at the garage, and before he left he would buy Dean a little pack of powdered-sugar donuts from the vending machine next to the ice-maker, and that was his breakfast. Daddy showed Dean how to heat up Sammy's bottle in the sink, stopped up and full of warm water, and how to test it on his wrist, and how to hold Sammy to feed him. In the morning Dean fed Sammy and watched cartoons with powdered sugar on his face until the lady down the hall came to check on them—she always wore high heels and Dean didn't know her name, but her earrings were big and a lot of the banging on the walls came from her room. Room twelve, which was where Dean was supposed to go, Daddy said, if anything happened while he was gone.

 

The big-earrings-lady would linger in the room for a while until Daddy came back on his lunch break, and gave her some dollar bills, and brought them food to eat. Then the hotel cleaning lady, who always looked at Daddy with soft brown eyes, which meant she liked him, Dean knew—the hotel cleaning lady, named Nora, would stay in the room with them for the afternoon, and read glossy magazines and make baby sounds at Sammy, who smiled a lot at her. Daddy gave her dollar bills, too, because she didn't have to be there; her cleaning shift didn't start until later at night; but she was nice, and sometimes she bought Dean snacks from the vending machine, and she always smiled at him.

 

He liked Nora, but he was careful not to like her _too_ much. He always felt guilty, when he liked her too much, because she wasn't Mommy, and she never would be, and liking her felt like a bad thing when Mommy was gone. Sammy smiled a lot at her, but Dean didn't smile very much. He read comic books quietly on his hard, ugly bed.

 

Nora would leave when Daddy came back and when Daddy came back it meant he was done at work, and he would take them across the street to McDonald's most times, but other times he ordered pizza or Chinese food, because there was no stove in room number nine. For a while it was like a treat, every night, hamburgers or stringy pizza cheese and watching old episodes of _M*A*S*H_ on the TV with Daddy all the time and going to bed whenever he felt tired, but after a while Dean started wishing for things like mashed potatoes or spaghetti or even the hard, crunchy carrots Mommy had always tried to get him to eat. Sammy still ate mostly baby food, which Daddy brought back from the store in jars, and one day after the Thanksgiving they didn't celebrate Dean was so hungry for something that didn't come in a paper bag that he opened one of Sammy's applesauce jars and shared it with him. The applesauce got all smeared over the baby's face, but they ate the whole thing together, from Sammy's tiny blue spoon—Dean pushing it into Sammy's mouth first and then scooping up more into his own—and Sammy wiped his sticky hands across Dean's mouth and made a little cooing laugh, and Dean laughed too and rubbed his nose on his brother's nose. Eskimo kisses. It was his first real laugh since the fire.

 

It was winter now, and it snowed a little, and Daddy ventured back to their empty house one day when it began to get really cold and came back with all Dean's sweaters and socks and his big coat. When Dean asked if they could go back to get the rest of his toys, the rest of Sammy's baby things, Daddy simply shook his head. He never answered when Dean asked about their house. It wasn't fair, he thought—it wasn't fair that he couldn't go back to his own house. It was still there, but they were _here,_ in room number nine, where everything smelled like cigarettes and fast food, and Dean was getting tired of donuts for breakfast every morning.

 

He was also getting tired of Daddy. He wished Daddy would _do_ something—talk more, hug him more, tell him all the things he wasn't being told. Stop leaving them with big-earrings-lady and Nora. Take them home. Dean was pretty sure people weren't supposed to live in the same room for this long. He was only four, but he was _almost_ five, and he knew that.

 

But Daddy was a big quiet man and Daddy went to work and sometimes he stayed out later than normal, going places he didn't talk about. And when he came back at night he stayed up with the lamp on at the table reading books.

 

Dean didn't know what the books were, but it seemed like Daddy came home with a new one every week—books with weird letters on the front that weren't the alphabet, or with drawings on them, like stars and circles. One day Nora was clearing the newspapers off the table and saw them and clucked her tongue and did something with her hand—she touched her forehead and then her breastbone and then her shoulders and looked sideways at the books with disapproval. And she held the little silver cross on the chain around her neck the rest of the day. Daddy hid them away after that.

 

Sometimes the heater didn't work and on those days Dean would put on two sweaters and wrap Sammy up in some blankets and burrow under the covers of his hard ugly bed, to keep them both warm. Sammy usually fell asleep in his arms, or else he turned his head as far as it would go in the crook of Dean's elbow to watch the cartoons on the TV. When the cartoons weren't on sometimes Dean watched a man in a suit raise his arms and yell a lot about Jesus, and sometimes the people in his audience would tremble and shake and their eyes would roll and it frightened him.

 

It was almost Christmas and Daddy's weird books were everywhere and Nora clucked her tongue every time she saw them, and one morning, before big-earrings-lady came to pop her gum in the doorway and watch them, Dean bundled himself and the baby up and took one out of the pile and curled up on the bed to look at it. He couldn't read it yet, not really—he knew some words, but most were too big and too strange—but he flipped through its coarse grey pages anyway. Sammy's hand flopped out from his blankets and he smacked at the book as Dean looked through it, squinting, trying to figure out what Daddy was reading about.

 

There were pictures, but they weren't nice pictures—nothing at all like the pictures in the books Mommy had read to him, in his bed in the house. They were all strange, twisted creatures, ugly things. On one page, a man with a goat's head that gave him goosebumps. He heard the click of big-earrings-lady's heels in the hall and closed it, shoving it across the bed away from him. He didn't like it at all. He almost wished he had one of Nora's silver crosses on a chain to hold. He stuck his finger in Sammy's closed-up hand instead.

* * *

 

_January 1984_

 

On a Saturday, snowy and dark and cold, Daddy was home in the evening and Sammy was napping and Dean was lying on his hard ugly bed tossing a bouncy ball he'd won out of a dime machine in the grocery store up and down and up and down when someone knocked on the door.

 

Daddy got up immediately, and Dean sat up, rubbing at his eyes, the bouncy ball held in his fist. His stomach growled; he hoped it was the takeaway man, with Chinese food, even though they'd had Chinese food three times in the last two weeks.

 

Daddy opened the door, but not enough to give money to the takeaway man, so Dean lay back down again. His feet were cold. It was only a few weeks until he was going to be five years old and he had a feeling that he wasn't going to get any birthday presents. He hadn't gotten any Christmas presents on Christmas, either. It seemed like those kinds of things weren't going to happen anymore.

 

He could hear Daddy's voice, low and mumbling—and a lady's voice, too, a nice soft lady's voice. Slowly, he sat up again.

 

Dean could just barely see someone through the crack, past the bulk of Daddy's body. Whoever she was, she was soft and short and her hair was dark and curly, but everything else was hidden, and he couldn't hear what they were saying, but the lady seemed—anxious. Or excited. She was talking a lot, and quickly, and he could see Daddy straightening, his shoulders settling. She was telling him something he'd been waiting to hear.

 

They stood and talked for a long time and then Daddy, quite abruptly, closed the door on the lady, and remained there for a longer time still, hand resting on the knob, face hidden.

 

“Daddy?” Dean said, feeling his stomach grumble and twist. “When are we eating dinner?”

 

Daddy almost jumped, as if Dean's voice had startled him; he turned, looked at him. There was a flash in his eyes that Dean had never seen before, under the dark bow of his forehead. Then he looked away, towards the crib where Sammy was sleeping, and then he crossed the room a little, leaned down and pulled something out from under the bed—a duffel bag, one he'd brought from their empty house. He picked it up and put it on the mattress and then opened all the drawers in the bureau under the TV and began pulling out all his clothes and all Dean's, too.

 

“Are we going?” Dean asked. He held his bouncy ball tight, feeling suddenly very awake. More awake than he had in weeks.

 

“Yes,” Daddy said. “Find the baby bag, Dean. Put Sammy's things inside it.”

 

“His bottles and stuff?”

 

“Now, Dean,” Daddy said, gruff and sharp, and Dean scowled, but did as he was told.

 

He gathered all of Sammy's unwashed bottles and his little baby clothes and his pacifier and put them all in the baby bag that still smelled like milk and Mommy's hair, even after all this time, and when it was full and lumpy he zipped it all up. Daddy zipped up the duffel bag, too, then found a backpack in the closet into which he put all those weird books—even the ones with the library stickers—and everything else, his sunglasses, his toothbrush, Dean's toothbrush, the big leather-bound journal he'd gotten a few weeks ago—all of it.

 

Together, man and boy, they cleaned out room number nine and pushed everything they had into their bags and backpacks, and the noise woke Sammy up and he burbled happily and nonsensically while they worked. When they were done Daddy left, went down the hall to the desk, and Dean stood over Sammy's borrowed crib, looking down at his baby brother's big eyes and wriggling fingers.

 

“We're going someplace, Sammy,” he said. And Sammy, of course, said nothing, but reached up his little arms and Dean grasped one of his hands in his, and said, “Think we're going on an adventure?”

 

Sammy only made another noise, and then Daddy was back and talking quickly, too quickly for Dean to really listen. But then they were gathering their bags onto their shoulders and Dean was picking Sammy up and holding him on his hip the way Nora had taught him and they were leaving room number nine at the Super 8 Motel. And they were crossing the parking lot to Daddy's car, and putting their bags in the trunk, which made a hollow sound when things landed on its floor, a sound it hadn't made before.

 

Dean clambered into the back seat, balancing Sammy carefully on his lap, and before he could even get comfortable on the familiar dusty leather Daddy was driving them out, away from the parking lot, through the cold chilly nighttime towards the distant lights of a highway somewhere.

 

They ate dinner at a Sinclair station while snow fell gently outside the big black windows, and dinner was a bag of chips and a bottle of soda and a pack of powdered-sugar donuts. Sammy fell asleep on Dean's shoulder when they started driving again, but Dean stayed awake—as Daddy drove them towards the wet black hiss of a highway full of cars he twisted, looked back, out the window at the rapidly fading yellow sign of the Super 8 Motel, at the tiny pinprick streetlights of the neighbourhood where their empty house still stood, at the leaves on the bushes, the blank metal fences, the snow-globe landscape that had been _home._

 

Dean knew—another marble in his heart. They were never coming back here again.


	3. III

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

The Braeden house was quiet at night, a kind of low humming quiet that came from refrigerators and air conditioning and the occasional hush of a car on the street outside. In the evenings when Dean divided up the remaining hours of the day in his mind, the better to sleep in, he used the five minutes that were spent checking locks and Devil's Traps to situate himself in that quiet, to wrap it up around himself like a thick wool blanket and carry it up to bed with him.

 

Tonight, he was having trouble wrestling the blanket over his shoulders.

 

Lisa and Ben had come home from the PTA meeting and scared him half to death with the sound of the door opening, and he'd jolted back into himself, still sitting on the couch with Castiel's unfinished beer on the coffee table, to realise that at least an hour and a half had passed since his friend had gone, and he'd been sitting there all that time—in a daze, a trance, whatever you wanted to call it. While Ben had tramped loudly upstairs Lisa had looked at him sideways, gone through the hall to start the oven for dinner, and he'd sat there a moment longer, trying to collect himself. It felt as if he was scattered everywhere—even now, after dark, it felt like that. As if someone had come at him with a hammer and broken him to bits and tossed them all over the living room. Fifty-two-card-pickup, Dean Winchester edition.

 

Those nasty fingers were still in the back of his brain, gouging into him. He'd been shaking his shoulders and twitching his neck all night trying to dislodge them. Lisa had had a question on her mouth all through supper.

 

The back door, the front door, all the windows, all locked, as they were supposed to be. The Traps under the rugs unmarred. The calendar lifted and fell as he passed, went wearily up the stairs to the dark hallway and the dark bedroom, still feeling as if there were two points of pressure in the back of his skull, like eyes boring into him, or someone gripping the back of his neck. The brush of Lisa's arm when he slid into bed was a relief. A real touch, a grounding one.

 

She was awake—he could see her eyelashes moving in the dimness—but he didn't expect her to sit up when he sat down, to take hold of his wrist and turn her head and look straight at him with her brow furrowed and her hair in her face, all seriousness.

 

“What's wrong?” she asked.

 

Dean blinked at her, blanking. A little comforted, too, strangely. She didn't even have to preamble with _is something wrong?_ She simply knew—she'd known all night.

 

“Uh,” he said, lamely. Hell. If the idea of telling _Cas_ had been difficult, the idea of telling Lisa was ten times harder.

 

“Dean,” she said, rearranging herself on the mattress and pushing her hair behind her ear, “you practically jumped out of your skin when we came home. Zoned out on the couch. And you've been—off in your own head for weeks now. What's wrong?”

 

He licked his lips, settled under her hand—he had no idea where to even begin. _If_ he should begin. What was this, really, after all? Waking dreams? Just another manifestation of the grief he wasn't doing so well at getting over? When the Millers had brought their baby home, when he'd had that flash of childhood, he'd thought it was a one-time deal, but tonight—tonight had set his teeth on edge. An hour or so lost to a set of very old memories he hadn't even thought he'd possessed anymore. It didn't feel like something that was going to stop anytime soon.

 

“It's, uh—um.”

 

No, he couldn't tell her. Because it wasn't spectacular enough to _tell._ It was just memory; it was just sadness, and Lisa had seen and endured enough of his high-end brand of sorrow in the last few months to last any woman a lifetime. He didn't want to put any more of it on her shoulders. He wanted her to sleep and not worry about him. He could deal with memory. He had to.

 

“I, um. I think I—I must have told you about my friend Cas?” he said, and she nodded, smiling a little bit.

 

“The angel? Yeah.”

 

Her hand smoothed up and down his arm, soft and cool.

 

“He stopped by,” Dean said, and Lisa cocked an eyebrow. “Just to, you know. Check in with me.” He cleared his throat. “It just, ah, it—jarred me, a little, I guess? You know. All that—all the old life.” He dropped his head, looked down at her hand, her beautiful slender fingers smoothing down his veins as if to keep him all together in one perfect piece. He reached across his body to touch it, push gently against it, slide their fingers together for an awkward tangled minute.

 

“Mm,” she said, in her throat. Her eyes were soft with concern. “That's it? You're sure?”

 

“Yeah,” Dean said, and he tried to smile as best he could—reassure her. “Yeah, just—bad timing on his part. That's all.”

 

Lisa narrowed her soft eyes a little, and he could tell she didn't fully believe him, but she let it lie. Her hand traveled up his arm and into his hair and she pulled his head forward, kissed him, and he closed his eyes and sank into her the way he had tried to sink into the silence downstairs: the smell of her soap, pungent jasmine; the gentle curl of her breath against his cheek, inside his mouth. Kissing Lisa wasn't like kissing other people. She was practically cashmere, the tenderest thing he'd ever touched, and he gladly let her put her arms around him, press her body against his back when they lay down again, hold him. Her lips against his neck where those holes were bored into his skull, soothing the pressure, cool and sweet, and he fell asleep like that—in her silence—thinking deliberately only of her, of this room and what it was and what was within it. A safe box in which he was secure, immune to the tricks, the siren calls, the dreamscapes of Super 8 Motels and baby fingers. He rested against Lisa, locked down by the flatness of her hand on his belly.

 

This wasn't going to beat him. He was not going to fall prey to falling backwards, grief and reminiscence be damned. This was his life now.

 

All the rest of that was too painful. Too far gone.

* * *

 

Dinner was quick and cheap on Halloween night, mostly because Ben was eager to start beating the pavement for candy in the costume Dean had helped him make during his weeks off. A wendigo, of all things. Ben didn't even really know what a wendigo was, but when Dean told him the kid-friendly version of the legend, he happily latched on to the idea, and now he was sitting at the table in everything but his mask, looking thoroughly monstrous and ready to go.

 

Tuna Helper—not Dean's favourite, but he wasn't complaining. It was thin and light enough that he'd have plenty of room for at least half of the trick-or-treat candy in the bowl in the front hall; Lisa had already lectured him twice about saving it for the neighbourhood kids, but she didn't really seem to mind him sneaking a few caramels every now and then. Say what you will about Halloween, Dean thought—knowing what he knew about the darkness outside, he should have hated the holiday, but in all his years it always brought a smile to his face and he'd been smiling all day, to his own surprise. To Lisa's too.

 

Maybe it was just the presence of so much candy, or maybe it was the impressively good night's sleep he'd gotten the night before, but he was feeling better than he had in weeks. He could almost forget the previous day's visit from Castiel and the memory that had followed, and found himself at odd moments realising he wasn't thinking about it much at all—stirring the pasta, or struggling with the truly massive bowl of sweets up front, or simply meandering about the house, smelling pumpkin spice. Only vague flashes of discomfort and sadness, today.

 

Across the table Lisa smiled at him for no apparent reason and Dean smiled back with an ease he hadn't felt since—well. In months. More than months. He was just scraping the last of the peas and tiny carrot-scraps out of the sauce on his plate when Lisa cleared her throat and asked, “So where've they got you working right now?”

 

“House out on Caplin Street.” It was a routine job, an addition onto some rich person's kitchen. A breakfast nook or something—whatever that meant.

 

Ben put his glass of milk down on the table hard, startling Dean. “Caplin Street? Over by the soccer fields?”

 

“Yeah,” Dean said, wiping his mouth and crumpling his napkin up, confused. “Why?”

 

Ben's entire face lit up. “Are you working on the haunted house?”

 

Really, the sight of a ten-year-old boy's face glowing with Halloween joy and the simple phrase _haunted house_ should not have made Dean's blood run cold. But it did. He felt his shoulders tightening, his hearing narrowing, the motion of his jaw stilling. This wasn't something he wanted to hear about over the dinner table in this house. This wasn't something he wanted to hear about period.

 

“The what?” he said, and his tone must have given him away, because Ben's face fell and he looked guiltily into his Tuna Helper.

 

He shrugged. “Seth at school said there was a haunted house on Caplin Street. I dunno.”

 

Lisa was holding her glass halfway to her mouth, looking directly at Dean across the table, looking at him hard. He stiffened, leaned back a little, cleared his throat. “What's, the, uh. The address? Seth tell you that?”

 

“Dean,” Lisa said, softly.

 

“Four-two-eight or something,” Ben said, scooping another mouthful of pasta up.

 

“Haunted house,” Dean said, keeping his voice careful, trying to uncoil the knot that had swiftly and vigorously formed itself out of his insides. “Like, haunted house, the kind people charge you for? You know, Halloween, you go in, dude with fake blood and chainsaw chases you around, that kind of thing?”

 

Ben shook his head. “No, like a haunted house. Seth's mom won't let him trick-or-treat there or anything.”

 

Lisa scooted her chair back, loudly, firmly, and got up; Dean avoided her eyes, scraping the remnants of his meal onto the far half of his plate, sitting silently while Ben drained the last of his milk and hopped up to clear his place and run upstairs to put his mask on. Lisa stood at the counter, watching him slump over the table.

 

“Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?” she said, finally.

 

Dean looked at her a long moment and then put his fork down with a hard sigh.

 

“No,” he said, running a hand over his face. “No, come on, Lis, it's Halloween.”

 

She cocked an eyebrow.

 

“Everyone tells stories about haunted houses on Halloween. It's probably nothing,” he said, mollifying, holding his hands out; she folded her arms.

 

“Of course it's probably nothing, but Dean, I know the way you're wired to work.”

 

“What, you want me to—what? See if this is a hunt? Come on.”

 

“No, no, I don't want that! Not unless _you_ do,” she said, turning her head to follow him as he got up to clear his dishes. God, but he felt pinned, pinioned, as if someone had glued his arms to his sides.

 

“I don't do that anymore,” Dean said, his voice tight. He braced his arms against the sink and looked outside, into the evening where orange lights were strung up down the street and glittering off the glimmer of fairy wings and monster masks. The first wave was out already. “You know I don't do that anymore.”

 

“Would it be such a bad thing?” Lisa said. Behind her Ben careened down the stairs, feet thumping on the hardwood, and vanished into the living room. “Honestly, I mean—I don't _like_ it, but it is what you do. Or did. And if it would, I don't know—if it would make you feel useful, or good? Or—something other than how you've _been,_ I—”

 

“And how have I been?” Dean said, looking at her, her soft face in the golden light, all sympathy and that special brand of stubbornness that was all Lisa. She touched his arm, briefly, her eyebrows piqued, her mouth twisted up.

 

“I don't know how you've been, Dean,” she said. “Why don't you tell me?”

 

He softened, then, a little, because he was incapable of remaining staid under that look from her for long. She had such searching eyes—she reminded him of Cas, in that way, though unlike Cas he knew she couldn't look directly _into him_ ; but she was good, maybe the best he'd ever known, at picking out his wrongness and his sadness from all the corners of his body in which it liked to hide, and even if she accepted his _I'm fine_ s and _don't worry_ s, she didn't believe them for a second. Like a coiled spring, Lisa Braeden was. Always poised to hold him up but never afraid to push him forward.

 

“I've been—I've been having a hard time,” he said, and he could almost feel her gentle recoil, the way she was rearranging herself even as he spoke so that he could lean the weight of his heart against her. “Lately.”

 

He didn't have to say what he was having a hard time _with._ She knew that already. There was only one thing that ever weighed on him.

 

“So—no, no. I mean—hunting isn't going to make me feel—it isn't going to do anything for me, not now.” He bit the inside of his lip, hard, until he tasted salt. “It's probably nothing anyway, just. Kids telling stories.”

 

They stood there against the counter in silence for a while until Dean heard Ben call from the front room, and Lisa sighed, unfolded.

 

“Guess it's time to take the wendigo out candy-hunting,” she said, and Dean managed a smile for that.

 

“I'll be here,” he said, straightening, pushing his gaze down into the sink. “Manning the candy bowl.” He took a deep breath, trying to piece his night back together from where it had been shifted by the idea of the haunted house. Three hours handling trick-or-treaters, half an hour examining Ben's haul for suspicious sweets, half an hour to send him to bed, an hour and a half to get to sleep himself, and then sleep, and then work in the morning, on Caplin Street.

 

Lisa kissed him, a firm kiss to his cheek in the way she had, that always made him feel safe and at rights, and then she slipped her track jacket off the back of her chair and pulled it on, moving towards the front of the house and over-eager wendigo-Ben with his jack-o-lantern candy bucket already slung over his arm. They called their goodbyes back to Dean and Dean lifted a hand as they went out the door, into the streets where a steady stream of costumed children was picking up.

 

For a moment he stood there, incredibly and suddenly alone. He gnawed at his lip.

 

Lisa wasn't _wrong._ It couldn't _hurt_ to look into four-two-eight Caplin Street. Just glance at the history of the place. See if there was any truth to what Ben had said—

 

He shook his head, dislodged that thought, shoved it into a darker part of his mind where it couldn't interrupt the schedule of the night, and he went with determination into the living room and turned on _Hocus Pocus_ and sat down by the massive candy bowl and waited for the doorbell to ring.

* * *

 

The rumour didn't die with Halloween.

 

Ben nagged Dean constantly about it, after he came back from the following day on Caplin Street, still coughing up sawdust. An avalanche of questions, now that the idea was stuck in his ten-year-old brain—had he seen the haunted house? Did it look haunted, or did it look normal? Who lived there; did he know? Could they drive past it that night, just to look, just to get a glimpse?

 

Lisa hushed him, eventually, when she saw how uncomfortable the incessant questions were making Dean, who himself had had a difficult time getting it out of his mind on the site that day.

 

Four-two-eight Caplin Street was a two-story house that looked, for all intents and purposes, just like every other house on the block—which was the first red flag. Usually when kids told stories about haunted places those places _looked_ haunted: witchy, gabled, tall and grey, usually with mangled shutters or rusted iron fences. But this place was as Stepford as it could possibly be—painted a pleasant dark blue on the outside, the lawn well-maintained. A van in the driveway most of the time, a smaller red car inside the garage whenever it was opened.

 

Then again, the people who lived there didn't seem to be plagued by any kind of ghost—at least not from Dean's vantage point, setting the windows in the breakfast nook. A family of five, from what he could tell: a blonde mom, a husband whom Dean's boss claimed was from Nigeria and who always wore impeccably fitted suits, and three high-spirited kids with their dad's dark hair and their mom's slender face. All in all the perfect picture of a perfectly happy, normal, all-American family, like something out of an inspiring holiday calendar. Even _looking_ at them, when they appeared outside their house, made Dean feel good.

 

How could they possibly be haunted? They didn't look like the kind of people who bought haunted houses, even by accident. They looked like the kind of people you wished nothing but health and happiness toward.

 

Dean hoped to God the story wasn't true. People like that didn't deserve a spirit looming over them.

 

But he gave in, a week after Halloween, and after a long fight with himself over a game of computer solitaire he just wasn't winning. He Googled the house on Caplin Street, just to see, just to satisfy his curiosity.

 

He hardly knew anything about that family, but his heart still sank a little when he found it—the obituary for the young man who'd killed himself in their attic ten years ago. The records that showed two families living there since—both of which had fled, quite quickly after gaining ownership of the place, without even bothering to properly put the house back on the market. The next morning he asked the woman who lived at the building site, as casually as he could, when that family had moved in.

 

“The Okoros?” she said, holding a glass of lemonade carefully between her bright pink French manicured nails. “Month and a half ago, maybe? Sweet family. Such a sweet family, you know?”

 

And, to his further dismay, it turned out that the Okoros' middle child, a girl named Amanda, went to school with Ben, and with Ben's friend Seth. If the story of the house being haunted had gotten its start from anyone, it would have been from her.

 

Dean idled his truck outside the site for a while that afternoon, uneasy, watching the Okoro house, watching Mr Okoro in his impeccable suit pulling up in the red car into the garage, listening for the distant sound of the door closing as he went in to meet his family.

 

He made himself drive home. He wasn't going to get involved in a case, not now, not here, if there even was one to begin with. Entertaining Castiel in the Braeden house was bad enough, a risk, he knew; too close to the life for his comfort. A hunt would be ten times worse. And who knew what kinds of things it would trigger? A simple meeting with his friend had frozen him halfway down Memory Lane on the couch for an hour and a half. There was no telling what other ghosts a spirit could dredge up from the hollows of his mind.

 

When Ben asked, again, about the haunted house—if it were true that a serial killer had murdered six babies in the basement—Dean didn't humour him. “That's not even a little funny,” he said, in response to the serial killer comment, “and kid, you gotta stop asking me about that house, okay? Your friend Seth's just messing with you. Leave it be.”

 

Easy enough to tell a ten-year-old to do. Ben didn't know what Dean knew. The kid had some idea of the truth of the world—being snatched up by a changeling mother at eight will do that to you—but he didn't know nearly all; didn't know about the Apocalypse, about angels and demons, not yet. Lisa and Dean had agreed that when he was old enough to really get it, they would tell him, but not yet. So, though he sulked about it, Ben stopped asking about the Okoro house on Caplin Street. But it wasn't so easy for Dean to set aside.

 

He kept himself staunchly away from Google and the library, telling himself harshly that it wasn't his issue, that it probably wasn't even an issue at all. Just a house with a shady past that seemed to have started to do well for itself. But it still existed, an inconsolable itch at the nape of his neck that flared up whenever Ben came home from school, whenever Dean looked too long at the place from across the street, hammer limp in his gloved hand.

 

So far it hadn't triggered anything. He'd been memory-free for a good solid few days now. Back on track with his mind-tricks and self-distractions save for that goddamn house sitting like a spectre in his skull. He was almost more afraid of what it would do, should it shift and jar something awake in his head, than what was plausibly inside it.

 

But it did get him thinking, about things he'd hoped never to have to think about under Lisa's roof, and it tumbled out, mostly by itself, a little while into November.

 

Lisa was reading in bed, and Dean was trying to focus on the rain on the roof and not on the jumbled mess of strings and pins and strategies in his mind, all of which were cobwebbed around four-two-eight Caplin Street, and he said—without stopping to think it through—“I was thinking maybe I should teach Ben how to shoot.”

 

Lisa paused, hands curled around her book, and then she closed it over her thumb and looked down at him.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

Dean shrugged, shifting himself up against the headboard. “I, uh. It just seems like a smart thing to do, you know.”

 

It was a mistake, a bad thing to say, and he knew it, but he couldn't take it back; he saw Lisa's mouth hardening and braced himself mentally for the tirade.

 

“Dean, Ben is ten years old,” she said.

 

“I know, I know, it's just—”

 

“What in the world would he need to shoot, anyway?” Lisa dog-eared her book and put it on the bedside table, leaning back against the headboard with him. “You've got this house covered with those Traps, salt packing-taped down on every windowsill, everything double-locked—anything that would worry _you_ isn't getting anywhere near him, or us.”

 

“Salt and Traps aren't total monster-proofing.”

 

“Is this about that God-forsaken haunted house on Caplin?”

 

He almost smiled at that. Sharpest knife in the drawer, this one. Zeroed in on the point of everything like the middle of a sniper's sights.

 

“It's got me thinking, you know—it's close to here, and you and Ben, you know a little, but you don't know enough.”

 

Lisa's brow lifted. “I know about changelings. Kind of hard to forget. And you've told me all about demons, angels, vampires, all the big ones, Dean. I know about fire and salt and silver and knives, hell, you keep a jug of holy water under our bed. And you told me, when you got here, that you were going to keep Ben and I out of all that as much as you could, as much as we could be.”

 

“I'm not saying I want to take Ben hunting or anything, I'm just saying it'd be practical if he knew how to shoot, if he knew the basics of—you know—what's _real_.”

 

“The basics carry a lot more weight for a normal kid than you think they do, Dean.”

 

That shook him—stirred him a little. He looked at her, the curtain of her hair over her face, the knowing in the set of her mouth.

 

She was right. He knew she was right. It was hard, sometimes, to remember how little civilians actually knew, to remember that the way he'd been as a child was not everyone's childhood, it was so ingrained into his body and soul, like tire treads on a dirt road. It was one thing to tell a kid some bits of wendigo lore the better to fuel his Halloween spirit and another entirely to tell him once and for all that everything he still hoped were just nightmares or scary stories were real, too, as real as changelings were in that ten-year-old mind.

 

But still—still.

 

“I'm not—suggesting it because I want Ben to turn out like I did,” he said, carefully, slowly. “I want the exact opposite, okay, I want Ben to be as normal as normal can be—finish school, go to college. But I also want him, and you, to be safe, to know how to be safe. I just can't— _live_ here in good conscience knowing that if something happened to me, you'd both be in danger by association.”

 

Lisa was quiet, her lower lip rolled between her teeth.

 

“Look, Lis,” Dean said, quieter now, “you pulled me up when I didn't have anybody else. You protected me from all that shit, that grief, _myself,_ those first few months. All I want is to protect you and your son.”

 

“Bang-up job I did on that,” Lisa mumbled, glancing below his face, and he knew she didn't feel like any kind of success, not with the way he was now. But she knew what he meant. The effort had been there. The only thing he wanted was to return it in kind.

 

“Just think about it?” Dean said, imploringly. She sighed, tilted her head, closed her eyes. “We don't even have to tell him it's for protection, or why I want him to learn. My dad first taught me to shoot when I was seven—it can just be something we do, you know, sort-of-dad and sort-of-kid.”

 

“From what I've heard of your father,” Lisa said wryly, “he's not the best role model for raising my son.”

 

But she was placated, her lips kinder, her argument done. She took a deep breath.

 

“I'll think about it,” she said. “Alright? I'll think about it. But I don't like it, Dean.” She touched his cheek, just lightly, with her fingertips. “I don't like what that life has done to you. I don't like the idea of it happening to Ben, even if it is just shooting practise.”

 

“He's a tough kid. Smart, too,” Dean said. “He'll be just fine.”

 

He thought of the time, years ago, when he'd first come back to Cicero, when Ben had been snatched by that changeling mother. How efficient and determined and downright _brave_ the kid had been, only eight years old, helping the other children escape the changeling's hideout, how calm and collected. Dean never, ever wanted Ben on the road, living like he had lived, doing the things he'd done—but he had to admit, even secretly, to himself, that Ben would make a damn good hunter, if he ever had to be.

 

“ _If_ you do teach him,” Lisa said, stifling a yawn to lie down, “then I hope you know you're teaching me, too.”

 

Dean smiled down at her, already half-asleep against the pillow, and reached over to click out the light.

 

It could almost be nice, he thought, if teaching them to shoot—like the Okoro house—stayed at a safe distance, and didn't jump-start anything. He was swerving dangerously close to the solid yellow line and oncoming traffic with this, but it simply wouldn't leave him alone: the old familiar itch to protect, to arm, to secure.

 

Haunted house or not, it was just practical, wasn't it? He certainly wasn't serving nostalgia with this. He was serving survival. He'd teach them both how to handle a gun someday soon, and then they'd all come home a little bit safer and he'd move on, back into the pre-prepared days, work and home and sleep and waking. It felt like a good thing to do. An extra lock on his safe and normal life, on the people he cared about.

 

He hadn't had the luxury of those extra locks the last time important people had been in harm's way. He wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.

* * *

 

Lisa, it turned out, was an excellent shot with the bolt-action; Ben, not so much.

 

They were out past even the furthest suburbs, in a field between two properties—farmland stubbled with harvested crops on either side, a nestling of trees surrounded by an old wooden fence. The ground was loamy and wet and muddy and they all had streaks of dirt up their boots and jeans already, though they'd only been out here an hour. From where Dean stood, a fair distance from the wooden fence, he could see their dark footprints back and forth, Ben's small, Lisa's thin, his own broad and solid. It was chilly; the wind whipped the breath out of their mouths, tangled Lisa's dark hair across her face, bit Ben's nose red, and this was probably highly illegal—shooting beer cans off a fence between two properties—but it smelled like true autumn, Dean's eyes prickled with cold, the sound of gunshot and the smell of gunpowder and the ecstatic shouts Ben let echo out whenever aluminum buckled under his bullet—

 

Well, it was bracing. He felt alive. He felt good.

 

“Turn—you're right-handed, right? Turn your left shoulder—yeah.”

 

Ben wasn't terribly good at shooting, it seemed; his grip on the rifle was always shaky, and nine times out of ten his shot bounced off the fence rather than the dented can perched precariously on the wood. But while Lisa stood pointing her gun at the ground and swaying on her feet, watching as Dean corrected the boy's stance and aim, he started to get the hang of it. And Dean had to admit he was a little proud, even if the aluminum can only zinged off the fence two or three times in a half hour, even if Ben was nowhere near the shot Dean had been at seven years old.

 

He wasn't afraid of the kickback; he got a singular joy from slamming the bolt and popping a new shell into place and watching the old one fall into the grass. And he cheered his mom on when Lisa annihalated six beer cans in a row, and then six beer bottles, exploding them in bursts of amber glass, trying to contain her triumphant grin whenever Dean looked towards her in appreciation.

 

They spent a blustering blur of two hours out in the cold until they'd exhausted the cans and bottles they'd brought with them and Ben's mouth numbed to the point where he could barely speak, and then they bundled back into the white truck parked off the road and drove back into Cicero for hot chocolate at the family diner just inside the city limits—and all in all, Dean thought, it was a success. Just as he'd planned. He sat in the sticky faux-leather booth next to Lisa, his arm around her, watching steam roll across her face, watching the cars slash by on the road outside.

 

His mind was calm; his heart was steady. He didn't even know why he'd been worried about the outing triggering memories in the first place. He thought—maybe if he was aware of dangerous territory, if he consciously focused his energy into keeping those creeping childhood memories at bay, they'd be powerless; they'd crawl back into their dark crags and leave him be with this woman and this boy, as he wanted. As he deserved.

 

He finished his hot chocolate and looked down at the stained bottom of the mug, listening to Ben recount a particularly good shot of his, and smiled absently.

 

Dean wasn't going to entertain why, exactly, those memory-trips, the _existence_ of these flights of nostalgia, disturbed him so deeply. That would only be inviting them in again. He wasn't going to think about the thing at their center, the point around which each of the two slices of time he'd relived had revolved—a baby with a name that made his throat constrict—no. He was taking action. He was building up his walls, his new home, his new safety. All of that, those old years trying to worm their way into him and bring him down, that was then. This was now. This was sitting in a diner with hands red from cold, hearing Lisa Braeden laugh. This was what he wanted.

 

_What Sam wanted._

 

His smile drifted, faded. But he listened hard to Ben's storytelling on the drive back home, gripping the steering wheel tight, and they made it back alright. They made it back alright.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Rural Illinois_

_August 1986_

 

It wasn't a cold day by any means, though there was some autumn in it. Out here, face and hands exposed to goosebump-breezes and stirs of sunlight, warmth settling only to be brushed away by passing chill—out here, today, Dean thought to himself that he felt too big for his shoes.

 

Dad was teaching him, after months of saying _no,_ how to shoot. Finally. Dean wasn't sure what changed his mind—his half-birthday had been a month and a half ago—maybe that had been the magic number that made him worthy of touching a trigger. Or maybe his pleading had worn Dad down, or maybe it had been something else, some other switch flipped. Dean didn't know—didn't care. Finally, finally, he was just over seven and a half years old, and Dad was out here in the bright strange-tempered field teaching him to aim a rifle, and that in itself was good enough for Dean.

 

He was used to his Dad by now. ( _Dad—_ no longer _Daddy—_ that syllable was for kids, and he didn't think he was much of a kid anymore.) But this, he wasn't used to: Dad crouched down behind him, arms out around him, correcting his grip on the gun. Dean could feel the heavy weight of him at his back, hear his steady breathing, could almost imagine he heard his steady heartbeat, too. He wasn't used to this kind of closeness and attention. It made him feel important, as if this were a rite of growing-up, a test, to prove to the looming god-shape of his father that he wasn't a baby anymore, that he would be wearing a man's boots soon, that he was too big for his shoes, that he could let loose a bullet and be everything Dad wanted him to be.

 

He focused on the distant shapes of aluminum cans on the piles of a fence, far off—little dented rectangles of grit and shine. Dad pulled on his elbow and he breathed. He knew he was going to want to remember this—not only for himself, but for Sammy, someday, Sammy who was back at Ms Chancey the nanny's big witchy house—Sammy was only barely three years old, but Dean knew he'd want to tell him how this felt.

 

The scattered brushlike trees, low to the ground and buzzing with the death of summer, the hollow ugly rattle of cicadas and crickets; the smell of the afternoon light on Dad's old jacket, and the smell of tobacco and the stubble on his face; the itch of a sneeze in Dean's throat; occasionally, a cloud drifting over the hot bleak sun; the cool sweat beneath his arms; he felt like an adventurer. A superhero, like Dad. He blinked the light out of his eyelashes and imagined himself—cheek against the cold rifle barrel—protector of this lonely stretch of Illinois, guardian of farmhouses and cornstalks, a cowboy or a lawman. Dad was telling him something in his ear. When it registered Dean squeezed on the trigger. He couldn't for the life of him recall what had been said.

 

The kickback was hard and bruised his shoulder—he felt it, like a purple smack in the shape of the butt of the gun, plastered against bone—and the sound knocked the wind out of him— _bang!—_ like a firework up close, a single punch to his chest. The gun seemed to hum in his hand. Something on the far-off fence pinged away, pierced straight through.

 

Dad said, “Again.” His hand met the space between Dean's shoulders, though—a single smear of pride.

 

The sun ducked away; Dean waited for the goosebumps to rise on his arms before he pulled the rifle up again; he narrowed the aluminum targets down into the center of his eye; by God, he shot down every one.

* * *

 

“I did good,” he told Sammy, later, patiently pulling a Lego out of his brother's mouth for the sixth time and snapping it, wet, into place on their primary-coloured castle. “Dad was proud.”

 

Sammy didn't seem impressed. He stuck another Lego in his mouth. He had all his baby teeth, now, but he still chewed on everything, and Dean thought that for being three years old he was still a tiny thing— _his_ shoes fit just fine.

 

Dad was gone somewhere by the time night fell and Rifle Day—so Dean had dubbed the occasion—was closing up, and they were sitting on the rug in Ms Chancey's house, and Dean could smell meatloaf baking in her oven in the warm yellow kitchen at his back. He made a face at Sammy— _ugh, meatloaf—_ but Sammy just stared placidly back with big round eyes that never seemed to get any smaller no matter how old he grew.

 

He was such a quiet kid. Dean thought that, if Sammy weren't his very own little brother, and therefore perfect, he'd be a weird baby, the kind grown-ups whispered about. Sammy liked picture books and cartoons and the ratty old stuffed dog that had been his one and only birthday present ever so far. And he _stared—_ he saw everything; he was always pulling on Dean's arm in the car and pointing a fat little hand out the window at something, babbling in gibberish sentences, _Dean, see, Dean!;_ but the things he saw were only ever for his brother. Even then he hardly ever spoke at length. To Dad and Ms Chancey and everyone else who was bigger, he rarely spoke or made any kind of noise, and even his crying was silent, and Dean thought sometimes that Sammy saw things that no one else saw—not even Dad, who saw everything.

 

He only laughed when Dean made him; he only slept when Dean slept, his soft face smushed into Dean's shoulder, and leaving spots of drool on Dean's black Galaga T-shirt. Most of all on his own he chewed on the ear of his stuffed dog (who had no name besides Dog), and _looked,_ and Dean knew it made Dad uneasy. The _looking._ The _staring._

 

Every night Dean took his strange little brother into the bathroom and helped him brush his tiny teeth, and when he put him to bed often Sammy stared up at the pebbled ceiling until Dean went to bed, too.

 

Once, Ms Chancey—an old kind of lady—called Sammy an _unnatural child,_ and that made Dean's teeth hurt.

 

Sammy wasn't unnatural or weird or wrong—he was just Sammy, and only three years old, and he was _Dean's_ Sammy, and therefore perfect. And Dean didn't know much about babies, but he knew that Sammy was the best baby there was—because he grew out of formula and baby food after Mommy died, and then he got teeth, one at a time, and before Dean knew it he was walking clumsy steps, arms outstretched towards Dean, stumbling over a knobby brown motel carpet in Arkansas right into him (his hard baby skull knocking into Dean's stomach, his sticky baby hands grabbing fistfuls of T-shirt, his baby mouth wide and grinning and triumphant), and then he was saying Dean's name; and Dad was two syllables, _dah-dee,_ and often when Sammy mastered a new word he'd hide his face behind Dog as if embarrassed by how quickly he was growing up. And Dean had carried him in and out of gas stations and hotels and day-cares and nannies' houses until he grew too heavy to carry, and then he'd held his pudgy dimpled hand as he tottered along sidewalks and gravel roads. He'd taught him the growing list of the places they'd been in the last two years, the collection of states that was growing in Dean's mind— _Nebraska, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri—_ and Dean had brushed Sammy's curly brown hair as it grew longer and longer, and counted all his teeth with pride, and he knew—even if no one else did—that Sammy was the best and most wonderful baby brother in the world, and he was Dean's.

 

“You're never gonna shoot a gun,” Dean whispered.

 

The oven went off and Ms Chancey's clunky shoes crossed the tile floor in rhythm. Dean fished the Lego out of Sammy's mouth again.

 

“It's fun, but I won't let you. I'm gonna shoot everything that ever tries to hurt you, 'cause I can do that now.”

 

Sam knocked their Lego castle over with his foot and smiled, eyes bright as copper-green pennies.

 

“And then you'll never have to shoot a gun, 'cause I'll protect you.”

 

Sammy blinked at him, and Dean decided that meant he understood. Good.

 

He unlaced his shoes and pulled them off and cracked his toes. Yes—no more shoes—he needed boots.

 

All through dinner, all through meatloaf, his hands felt hot and numb, humming with the gun, still. Later, much later, in the guest room of Ms Chancey's house that smelled like flowers and cotton, he went to sleep, Sammy smushed into his shoulder, thinking of fireworks inside his chest. _Boom. Boom._

* * *

 

Dean liked Ms Chancey as much as he allowed himself to like anybody who wasn't Dad or Sammy. She was a small old lady, and she stooped; her hair was thin and very curly and sat atop her head in a kind of _poof,_ and she wore big thick glasses that made her look like an owl. She smoked cigarettes but her hands were kind, and Dean and Sammy had been sleeping in her guest bedroom for four and a half weeks now.

 

Motel rooms had been rare in the past year. Unlike during the months in Room Number Nine, Dad didn't always come home at night anymore, and though necessity had forced him to leave Dean alone with Sammy for a day or two before, he didn't seem to like doing that. Dean, for the most part, didn't care—it made him feel grown-up, when he was handed the responsibility for the locks and latches and heating up their dinner—but on those few occasions he'd lost all his bravado under cover of darkness; sleeping without Dad's protective bulk in the other bed seemed almost impossible. Sammy, of course, warm in clean PJs and clinging to Dean's pillow, always slept like a stone, but Dean remembered clearly sitting up all night waiting for the sun to rise, straight-backed and scared on the edge of the bed, listening for the rattle or intrusion of the burglars and monsters that the shadows always seemed to suggest were lurking right outside the yellowed windows.

 

Dean didn't believe in monsters, really. That is, he knew perfectly well how very real they were—but knowing seemed somehow to make them less dangerous, less likely to hurt him, as Dad was constantly reminding him they would. Dad hunted them—Dean knew that—but he never talked about it, never came home with details or anything tangible except the smell of alcohol on him. That, then, was becoming his father's smell—whiskey and gunmetal. Whenever it was around, Dean felt safe, guarded. Its absence, when it was gone, was acute.

 

Whenever Dean asked _why_ Dad hunted monsters, where he found them, what he did to them, how come Dean couldn't help him—those questions made him mad. More often than not they earned Dean a lecture delivered just below shouting about how the world was dangerous and the nighttime was more dangerous still and how Dean didn't need to know anything except how to keep Sammy safe. “You're seven years old _,”_ Dad would say, and Dean would bite his lip to keep from correcting him. Seven and a _half._ “Your job is to protect your brother and obey me. Otherwise you're both in danger. Do you understand me?”

 

And he did, he really did; Dad had told him, soon after their fourth move away from Lawrence, in a tiny, chilly mountain town in Missouri, the truth about Mommy—how a monster had killed her, and it was his job now to track it down and kill it. Dean had cried inconsolably for hours, only five years old and uncomprehending, but he'd also been proud—proud that he was old enough for Dad to tell him things like that, proud that his Dad was doing something so brave. Dad had made him swear never to breathe a word to Sammy until it was time, and that order lodged itself like a tiny bird in Dean's heart, and every time Sammy grabbed his sleeve and asked “Dah-dee?” he remembered it, and forced down the urge to impart the secret to his baby brother.

 

It had done something to him, that secret. He felt bigger because of it, heavier, stronger. With it had come the notion—even only at five years old—that one day he'd be big enough and old enough to help Dad on his mission; he'd be smart enough to find the thing; he and Dad would kill it together one day. And if he wanted to get there he had to be obedient; he had to look after Sammy. He had to look after himself, too, to give Dad the time to look, to hunt, to gather information.

 

Ms Chancey disapproved of the way they lived. She was fond of Dean, he knew—she was always smoothing his hair with her knobby fingers, and clicking her tongue whenever the absence of Dad weighed too heavily on her big warm house. “It's not right,” she'd say, leaning on the wall in the kitchen, her big plastic phone tucked into her shoulder; she had lots of lady friends, who all looked a lot like her, _poof_ hair and big glasses and beaky noses, and she talked to them constantly about her two little visitors. “I'm happy to do him the favour, of course, of course—after how he helped out—but it's not right! Moving children around like that.”

 

Dean didn't know where Dad had met her, but he liked her better than the last two nannies they'd had. She sighed and clucked about their situation, gave Dad stern looks whenever he appeared only to tell her he was disappearing again, but she accepted the money he gave her, though she seemed suspicious as to where it had come from. She thought Sammy _unnatural,_ but she didn't dislike him; from her basement, a dark, cold, frightening place, she would bring up dusty old toys that her own children had played with when they'd been small, and she would watch Sammy mash plastic buttons and build lopsided Lincoln Log houses with her chin in her hand and a smile on her thin lipsticked lips.

 

When she made supper she enlisted Dean to help her, and he had to admit he liked standing on her rickety step-stool in her thin corridor of a kitchen, rolling out the dough for a pot-pie or stirring spaghetti sauce. Living with Ms Chancey almost felt normal—almost felt like the years before the fire—and sometimes Dean secretly pretended that Ms Chancey was his grandma; he had no real grandmothers to compare her to, so she fitted quite nicely into that spot in his mind.

 

He didn't know what Dad was hunting in this part of Illinois, but it kept him occupied. He'd only been back to town three times in the last four and a half weeks—once to sit in Ms Chancey's back study and look through old books for a day and a half, without eating or speaking to anybody; once to give her money and leave again straight after; and once to take Dean out to the meadows with his rifle and teach him to shoot. Ms Chancey said that he'd be gone another week this time. She seemed aghast about it, but to Dean this was commonplace. Once, last year, just after his sixth birthday, Dad had dropped them off with some old man friend of his in Mississippi and hadn't come back for a month. That had not been the best month, Dean recalled—the old man had been forgetful and cross, and though they'd been fed and warm and they'd had a place to sleep, he and Sammy had been bored out of their skulls. That February remained in Dean's mind as the February of War Movies—he and Sammy had sat on the hard brown carpet in the old man's living room, propped up against his coffee table, watching endless runs and reruns of black-and-white footage about World War I and World War II on the staticky, clunking TV, for most of the time they'd been there.

 

Not so with Ms Chancey. She was old too, but not cross; on the days when her hip didn't pain her, she'd take them out for walks, Sammy toddling between them, each hand held in one of their own. There was an ice cream stand two blocks from her house and once a week they'd walk there, and she would buy Sammy a soft popsicle and Dean a vanilla cup covered in a chocolate shell. She told them, more than once, that she wished they could meet her own children, but they were all grown-up or dead now; it was just her, in her tall witchy square house, with her one neighbour, the muddy corridor between those houses, and fields upon fields on either side—telephone poles punched into the earth down the highway as far as Dean could see when he leaned out of her top window, the blue sky turning grey down at its edge, flat-bottomed clouds skimming overhead. When it rained the whole world smelled clean and new; in the morning under the infant sun it smelled like cows and wet grass; the window in her guest room was open every night, and when she sent them to bed a breeze usually lulled them to sleep, and the sound of evening insects was as close to a lullaby as they got.

 

Dean lay in the bed, the night after Rifle Day, with Sammy sprawled next to him, his leg tossed over Dean's stomach, head tucked into Dean's shoulder. Downstairs Dean could hear Ms Chancey cleaning up the dinner dishes, humming. The light from the hallway was soft.

 

“Sammy,” he whispered. “Where we been? You remember?”

 

“Ne-baska,” said Sammy.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Miz-uwi.”

 

Sammy didn't have the letter _r_ yet; his little tongue still lisped against his tiny teeth.

 

“Where's home?” he asked.

 

Sammy kicked his foot against Dean's stomach and didn't say anything.

 

“ _Kansas,_ Sammy. Say _Kansas._ You remember Kansas?”

 

“Kansas.”

 

“So where's home?”

 

Sammy huffed. “No,” he whined, and pushed his face into Dean's shoulder. “Dean.”

 

“ _Kansas,_ Sammy.”

 

“Kansas.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Sammy was assuming his usual sleepy-octopus position against Dean's side, so he let the quiz drop for now. He worried, sometimes, that Sammy would grow up not knowing important things—where he came from, the place he'd been born into—so he asked him, every now and then, to be sure he remembered.

 

Sammy was asleep by the time Dean thought to look back at him again, his cheek mushed against Dean's arm, curly hair moving a little bit in the night breeze. Ms Chancey was still humming downstairs.

 

“We should stay here forever,” Dean whispered, too softly to wake him, reaching up to touch Sammy's hair for a minute, the way Mommy had touched his hair at night. “And when you get big enough we can ride the school bus to the school and you can learn your ABCs for real. And I can learn math and stuff, and get straight As. And Ms Chancey will give us birthday presents and Christmas presents too. And we won't have to move anywhere else. I can teach you baseball. I can play on a baseball team and you can come watch. And Dad—”

 

He bit down hard on his tongue to keep from saying anything about the monsters, about where Dad was—even though Sammy was asleep he still felt that hitch in his chest, that latch of obedience snapping.

 

“And Dad will come back more,” he said, settling on that. “And we can play hide-and-seek, if you want, all the time.”

 

The tree outside Ms Chancey's house—a big tall chestnut tree with a rope swing on it, as old, she'd said, as her first baby, who was dead now—rustled and whispered in the wind, and Dean saw the edge of the moon through the open window.

 

What he wouldn't give for that. They could be Ms Chancey's new babies, and she could be kind to them forever, and when the time was right Dean and Dad would kill that creature and then everything would finally be okay. Sammy would never have to know about monsters. They could both be normal kids, if only Dad would let them stay here, in the best place they'd been in two years. He wanted that so badly, for himself and for Sammy too, that he almost wanted to cry.

 

He heard Ms Chancey's shoes in the hall and saw her shadow come around the corner to close the bedroom door.

 

Maybe someday he'd teach Sammy that home was _Ms Chancey's house._ Under the heavy late-summer night, it didn't seem like too much to hope for.

* * *

 

Dad picked them up from Ms Chancey's house nine days later and they left it. She stood on her front stoop watching them drive away, one hand on her chest, the other limp at her side. She'd taken Dad's money and kissed the tops of their heads and Dean hadn't even gotten to say goodbye.

 

Sammy was sniffling in the back seat with him, kneeling on the upholstery, looking back down the flat grey road at her vanishing house. “Mih Chan-ee,” he whimpered, once, and pulled at his tear-streaked little face.

 

“Why can't we stay longer, Dad?” Dean asked, meekly, seeking out his father's dark eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were pointed west, but how far west Dad meant to go, Dean wasn't sure.

 

“I have work,” was the only reply he got.

 

Sammy cried so much the longer they drove and the further they got that eventually Dean had to distract him. They played patty-cake, Sammy's hands damp with his tears, all the way across the state border, and far beyond.

 

Dean felt stupid, later, once they'd stopped in a little grey town, and Dad had deposited them both in a flat, hot room on the second floor of a Motel 6. He lay flat on his back on one of the beds, arms out as if to make snow angels, while Sammy—all his sadness forgotten—sat glued to the muttering of the TV. Stupid to think they could have stayed anywhere with anybody for the rest of his life, stupid to think that he could have gone to school on a school bus and played on a baseball team.

 

“Look after Sammy. I'll be back tonight,” Dad had said, before he'd left them, and Dean closed his eyes now and thought of those words, let them turn yellow and fill up the inside of his head. He spelled them out letter by letter, quietly, to himself. That was his job—not school, not sports. He was seven and a half; he needed boots soon; he was practically a grown-up, and Sammy was still practically a baby.

 

While the moon rose he pictured himself, blowing a monster's head off with Dad's rifle, with perfect aim, the way he'd learned on Rifle Day. He imagined picking up a baseball bat, tamping down the dirt at home plate, lifting and swinging and knocking down a demon with black bug-eyes, right down into the grass, and Sammy high up in the metal bleachers, safe and warm.

* * *

 

* * *

 

 

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

It took Lisa at least ten minutes to rouse him that next morning, his alarm still beeping incessantly in his ear.

 

“You sick or something?” she said, pulling on her track jacket for her morning run, while he was still pulling himself upright in bed, rubbing at his eyes. “It's not like you to oversleep.”

 

He felt exhausted, as if he'd been staring too long at a TV screen. He yawned into his hands. “Didn't sleep well.”

 

Lisa scoffed. “You're telling me. Tossed and turned all night.”

 

“Sorry. Nah, I'm okay.”

 

She kissed him, surprisingly long and slow and tender, before she went downstairs, and Dean sat there, covers still half-draped over his knees, listening to her open the front door and close it behind her.

 

He was an idiot, really. To think anything like these—memory-trips, or waking dreams, or whatever the hell they were—could be avoided by the _power of positive thinking_. Of course they would come for him in sleep, too. He felt as if he hadn't had a minute of rest. From the moment he'd closed his eyes, still feeling warm and numb in his palms from shooting out in the fields, to the moment Lisa's hand had woken him, it had been brightness, vivid remembrances playing across his eyelids like a goddamn projector reel, like a fucking drive-in movie. Even now, in the rhythmic rattling of the refrigerator downstairs, he heard the _pat-pat-pat_ of three-year-old feet on farmhouse linoleum floor, heard the lisping _r_ in the movement of his skin against the sheets, felt toddler-weight on his shoulder like a ton of bricks.

 

He was going to be late for work. He sank back down in the sheets anyway, staring up at the ceiling, unable to move though he willed himself with all his strength to rise. _Kansas,_ he thought, way back in his brain, too far back to be hushed. _Miz-uwi. Ne-baska. God._

 

He was still there when Lisa came home, her face flushed, her hair damp with sweat. He called in sick to work. It felt as if the whole world was whispering and rustling and moving to the sound of Sam.

 

The faint sunlight on the windowsills flashed into his eyes like the white of baby teeth. He threw up more than once.


	4. IV

In the numb days, before he'd managed to slip out from under the worst of the weight of Sam's death, Dean had clung to sleep like rust to metal. Sleep was safe, and sometimes it was even dreamless. For the first few weeks in Lisa's house he'd stayed in her bed for hours, even days, unable to move for his grief and sadness, crumbling into darkness where no one could touch him or speak to him or do anything to him that would remind him of what he'd lost and where he was and what he was looking forward to.

 

There was something to be said for that kind of unconsciousness. It had a twin in work, in the constant white noise of whirring saws and drills and the steady rhythm of hammers—a waking mindlessness—and Dean threw himself headlong into it in the following days. The job in the house on Caplin was finished, and Ben had stopped asking about the haunted Okoro place, and though Dean was unable to shake its presence in the back of his head, it was no longer a threat. Maybe it _was_ haunted; maybe not. Either way, it wasn't his business, not right now, and he was glad of the opportunity to move on away from it. There was too much potential there, too many tripwires waiting to be triggered.

 

He kept on an impassive face when he didn't have the monotony of work or sleep to fall back on, and things in the Braeden house did find a kind of normalcy. He and Lisa went to their jobs, Ben to school and back; Cas didn't come to call or interrupt the routine of their lives; Dean pretended, resolutely, so hard that it at least began to manifest on his face, that he was okay.

 

Inside he felt a longing towards the dark, the ability to resume the condition he'd been in when he'd arrived on this doorstep. He no longer had the privilege of crawling into bed and lying there for days anymore. People who were _getting better_ didn't do that kind of thing. It was regression; it was bad, and if he so much as tried it, he knew, Lisa would start insisting on things like counseling and talking-to-someone and he couldn't do that. He could hardly talk to _her_ about it, Lisa, whom he trusted and loved as much as he trusted and loved Castiel or Bobby—so how could he ever be expected to explain himself to a stranger in a stiff leather-backed chair? No one living, no one, could begin to unravel all the different layers and colours and shapes of the brother-shaped hole in the fabric of the world. No one.

 

There was too much to Sam that no one but Dean knew, things he had to keep secret, even if, neglected, they banged about and dented the lock-box of his heart to the point of pain. Sam—both baby-faced and grown-up, child and man at once, half-memory and half-apparition—was lodged in his throat, too deep to be coughed up, too shallow to be swallowed, like a drink of water he'd taken wrong, or sickness. He was curled up in a corner of Dean's mind and he seemed inclined, as if it were his only purpose anymore, to rise like the moon whenever too much silence or the vulnerability of dreams gave him room to rise in.

 

More than once—usually following his deep waves of desire to simply crawl into bed and sleep for years—Dean wondered whether or not this persistence of memory meant something. If it portended anything, if it had some end-game, some agenda, some device on him. If it didn't—if he was only remembering these flashes of childhood by chance, without cause—then it was simply cruel.

 

It was a struggle between venturing out to work and pleading illness to stay in bed, and Dean felt as if he were constantly taking steps backwards and backwards—having hit the peak, as good as he was ever going to get, he was now bungee-cording back towards immobility and nightmares and mechanical sorrow, undoing any and all progress he'd made towards the apple-pie life Sam had sworn him to. He at once hated himself and felt entirely helpless. Life drifted by in swathes of light and dark. He almost wished another ghost of the past would strike, to give him something to ground himself in.

 

Really, there was only the past anymore. Time marched on, into deepening grey November, into barren trees and early-morning fogs, harvest moons, autumn wreaths on dark green doors, heavy coats and muddy lawns, but it never seemed to indicate any kind of future. It was all moving forward, but he didn't seem to be moving with it—streets and skies and weather reports stretching out on either side like elastic, blurring and smudging, while he stood still, expecting constantly the tap of the hand on his shoulder, the soft fingers taking hold of his chin to pull his face back and look at whatever rattling piece of life was waiting to be witnessed next.

 

He didn't have long to wait. When it came again—on a late close Sunday morning, as he lay alone in the dreary dawn in Lisa's bed, unwilling or unable to rise—he was ready for it. Truth be told, it almost came as a relief. He shut his eyes when he felt the fingers twitching, and let it come.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Carver's Bridge, West Virginia_

_March 1987_

 

After Ms Chancey, there was one more nanny; and after that there were none.

 

She was a younger woman, a minimum-wage worker at the miniscule local grocery store, and she had a scary streak in her a mile wide—a pleasant smile, certainly, but she had holes in the crooks of her elbows, and Dean knew she did drugs. When she was high, which was often, she left them without food in her unkempt and cold-faced little house on the cracked, weedy street, and Dean—angry that Dad would ever think of leaving them in the care of someone so utterly careless—would have to venture to the neighbour's place and ask the pinch-faced old man who lived there for a can of Campbell's or anything at all that could be spared.

 

It was a cold, cold March, and Sammy—almost four years old—was getting thin.

 

Dean hadn't seen Dad in a month and a half. He'd hunted here, in Carver's Bridge, West Virginia, and then gone his own way, chasing down something Big and Important—or so Dean gathered—two states over. Why Dad had chosen Liza Greyman to look after his sons, Dean had no idea. He assumed, as had been the case with the last batch of nannies, that she was someone he'd met on the job who owed him a favour, and had agreed to babysit for as long as necessary, and for the right amount of cash.

 

Dean thought it most likely that Liza had been off her skull on whatever it was she shot into her veins when she'd told Dad she'd look after his boys. Certainly, whenever she was sober enough to actually notice they were there in her sagging shack of a house, she looked at them as if they were stray cats she didn't quite have the heart to drown in the creek.

 

Ms Chancey she was not. She never tucked them in, never took them out for ice cream, hardly ever bothered to speak to them. When she wasn't at work, she was sitting cross-legged on her old sofa in the front room, her stringy hair hanging in her face, smacking at her arms with a syringe between her teeth, or passed out on the same sofa with her miniscule television set flashing blue and white light across her slack-jawed face. Sometimes she remembered to cook them food—usually something out of a can, lukewarm in a pot on her half-broken stove—but that was about as good as her babysitting got.

 

To Dean was left, then, the rest of the work, not only in looking after himself, but in looking after Sammy. He was used to feeling hungry to some extent, and at a proud eight years old now was more than capable of finding things to eat amongst the mess of Liza's house (sleeves of Saltines crushed under the mattress on the floor of her back room, unopened mac-and-cheese boxes stacked haphazardly beneath a desk, cans of soda, dented but whole, rolled beneath her ragged sofa). But Sammy was four, and still didn't speak much, and Dean was acutely aware of the fact that since they'd been living here in Liza Greyman's house, the familiar softness and baby-roundness of Sammy's hands and wrists had wasted away. He had bony little fingers now, and bony little arms.

 

That, more than anything, was what worried Dean. He knew how to deal with the scruffy, bone-thin, dangerous-looking men and women who sometimes skulked in Liza's front room with her, smacking their arms or pushing needles between their toes—he'd lock himself and Sammy inside the room where they slept, and he'd read the Funnies from the newspaper to him while they sat on the bed, until the people were either gone or unconscious in the other parts of the house. He knew how to keep them both occupied when Liza was at work; either Dean would make them both lunch and they'd sit on the floor watching daytime TV, or they'd walk together through the drizzle and fog and the cold empty street to the library two blocks away, where inside it was warm and fluorescent and Sammy could play with the building blocks in the children's section or pick out a picture book to look at, and Dean could be around people who at least smiled at him sometimes. Liza never smiled at him. The most he ever got out of her was a barked, slurred order to get out of the front room and go play somewhere, or a half-hearted question as to whether or not Dean was hungry. Sammy she almost totally ignored, as if he were too small for her to notice. So when Dean came to her, in one of her lucid moments, and told her that Sammy wasn't getting enough to eat, she looked at him as if he'd made mention of a total stranger, and it took her a full five minutes to remember that she had not one, but two boys in her dilapidated excuse for a house.

 

She went out and bought hot dogs, that night—turkey hot dogs in a wet plastic package—and she gave them to Dean as if that was good enough. The package lasted most of that week, and sometimes Dean cut them up and mixed them into Sammy's mac-and-cheese, and Sammy liked that a lot. It didn't make his wrists any less skinny, but he didn't cry so much from hunger for a while.

 

Dean was getting thinner, too. He knew that for sure. Liza had a cracked, blackened mirror in her dingy bathroom, propped up against the wall, and while Sammy was sitting placidly in the yellowing tub for his bath Dean often stood in front of it, lifting his shirt up to see the way his belly pushed out beneath the shadows of his ribs.

 

He felt trapped, there, and wished more than anything that he could call Dad and bring him back to take them out of this place. Surely, if Dad knew exactly who he'd left them with, he'd steal them away in a heartbeat. But Liza didn't have a phone, and Dean didn't know the number of the place where Dad was staying. He knew _she_ did, for emergencies, but though he searched on her cluttered desk and through the waterlogged phone book next to the microwave for ages, he couldn't find the slip of paper with the digits on it. And besides, even if he'd had it, he had no way to make that call—no change for the pay phone outside the library, and too much pride to ask the librarian for a few quarters.

 

It would have been almost unbearable, Dean thought, if Liza were an angry addict rather than the rail-skinny blissed-out one she was. He resolved firmly that if she ever lifted a hand against either of them, he'd bundle up Sammy and leave and not look back, and they'd sleep under the library portico if they had to, until Dad came back. But she never hit them—only forgot them. Sometimes she showed them the barest modicum of kindness, whenever the fat envelope full of cash from Dad appeared in the mail every other week—went in and switched out the pillows on the bed, or put a movie on for them—but it never lasted.

 

Her house was as grey as her face and her name. The floor in the bathroom was full of rot. There was hardly any heating to speak of, and hardly any blankets either; most nights Dean bundled Sammy into his coat and his winter hat and then put his own on, too, and they slept together like that, shivering a little. There was a draft under the window in that back room that froze the iron of the bedstead and chilled their bodies in the night. Sometimes the taps ran rusty red, and Dean never let Sammy drink from that tap. When they were thirsty he went across the dead, cracked side yard to the old man's house and filled up their cups with hose water, clear and cold, or smashed ice cubes with a spoon and shoved the pieces into the holes in soda cans.

 

Sammy got quieter as he got thinner until he was almost mute. His little face was drawn and sad and his nose was always red with the beginnings of a cold that luckily never seemed to take hold. He seemed to get smaller, too, the longer they stayed there, until Dean thought he almost looked like a toddler again. His knees got knobby. The only time he ever smiled, or spoke, or seemed to feel brighter and more his age, was when Dean walked him to the library—he sat under the warm window, making stacks of alphabet blocks or paging solemnly through a kid's book, answering anything Dean said with short sentences.

 

Dean—in his own small way—was worried that if they didn't get to a better place soon, if they were stuck with ignorant Liza Greyman for much longer, Sammy would be stuck like this, still not speaking as much or as well as Dean had at four, too skinny, overly-tired, an exhausted little boy. West Virginia was freezing and damp and full of acrid smoke, and no place for kids like them.

* * *

 

In a moment of particular sobriety, two months after Dad had gone away, Liza Greyman had the presence of mind to send them to school.

 

Dean had only been in school once in the last few years. He'd gone to a summer school during the three months they'd lived out of the same motel room in Alabama last year, before Mrs Chancey, had learned enough to leave the first grade.

 

Now, before Dean really knew what was happening, he was in standing in the doorway of the second-grade classroom, neither a backpack nor a single pencil to his name, and the teacher—a tall, softly pretty woman with brown hair and a blue dress—was asking his name.

 

Sammy had been herded off to the wing where the preschool classrooms were. Dean spent that first day fidgeting at his desk, uncomfortable without Sammy in his sights, thinking of all the things that could go wrong—a teacher could be a demon, or some other kind of monster, and how was he supposed to protect his little brother when he wasn't with him?

 

He wasn't ashamed to admit he didn't learn a thing that day. The teacher, Miss Donahue, seemed eager to speak to him after the dim sound of the bell, but he ducked out with the rest of the kids before she could arrest his attention, and he hurried down the hall to the kindergarten wing to look for Sammy.

 

Sammy was sitting on the floor outside a classroom, waiting for him, and when he saw him he got to his feet and ran to him, his coat hanging off his little shoulders, his curly-haired head pressed into Dean's chest. Together they walked back to Liza's house—she'd forgotten them at the school, it seemed—and Sammy babbled happily about Miss Nancy, the preschool teacher, and about colouring books. It was the most Dean had heard him speak in weeks. By the time they got back to the house their faces were pinched red with cold.

 

Still Dad didn't come back for them; Liza seemed to relapse into her old ways a few weeks into their enrollment at the school. Now Dean woke every morning to pour dry cereal into plastic cups for the both of them and to put Sammy's boots on his feet, and to gather what little school supplies they had in time for the bus down on the corner. The school had given them backpacks, and the classrooms gave them pencils and paper, and otherwise, they had nothing. Some of the other children, those who had families of more means, muttered about them; Dean knew it; he knew they looked as poor as they were. He wore his coat all through the day so as not to lose it—it was the only one he had. He was glad, at least, that Sammy's schoolmates were too young to make fun of him.

 

Sammy adored school, and by the time they eventually left Carver's Bridge, Dean had concluded that school was the best part of their lives in that place. Five days a week they at least ate well in the tiny, cramped cafeteria, and Sammy's cheeks grew rosy and fuller. He was still skinny, skinnier than he'd ever been before, and so was Dean, but the rumbling of their hungry stomachs kept them awake less and less in those precious, fleeting weeks. They did their homework by the light of the TV in the front room while Liza breathed and rolled her head on the arm of the couch, spent needle between her fingers. Dean made them canned soup or peanut butter sandwiches on Wonderbread at night; sometimes he smuggled home cartons of cafeteria milk for them to drink. It was tepid, but it was rich.

 

It was hardly any kind of life. But they were surviving. That was all that really mattered.

* * *

 

It was early May before anything changed.

 

Miss Donahue was handing out report cards at the end of the school-day—a brighter, sunnier day than any Dean could remember in this town—and when she gave Dean his envelope, she said, in her kind soft voice, “Could I please talk to you, Dean, before you go home?”

 

He paused, fidgeted.

 

“I gotta get my brother,” he said.

 

“Can you get him, and bring him back here?”

 

Dean shrugged, and nodded. He slung his backpack around over his shoulder to stuff the report card inside as he half-jogged down the hall to where Sammy was waiting.

 

When they got back to Miss Donahue's room, everyone else was gone; it was strange to see the desks empty, the sunlight painted across them; it felt at once warm and uncomfortable. Miss Donahue smiled and waved at Sammy when they came in, but Sammy said nothing—he'd been chattering all down the hall but stopped abruptly at the sight of a stranger.

 

He climbed up into a desk chair and sat there, looking melancholy, and Miss Donahue took a seat at her desk, too. Dean stood awkwardly for a moment, unsure where to go.

 

“Please sit down, Dean. I only want to ask you a few questions,” said Miss Donahue.

 

Dean liked her. She was always nice to him, even when he failed math quizzes, which was often. More than once she'd offered to stay after to help him learn his subtraction, and he'd only declined for Sammy's sake, to get him back to Liza's house and get dinner in them both. He was going to be sorry, he thought, to have to leave her class, when the time came.

 

He sat down in the chair next to Miss Donahue's desk, and she folded her long-nailed hands on the surface of her blotter.

 

“Where do you live, Dean?” she said.

 

Dean blinked, a little taken aback; he'd expected something about his report card, which he hadn't even bothered to look at, or something about his behaviour.

 

“On 40th Street,” he said.

 

Miss Donahue nodded. “With your—aunt? Is that right?”

 

Dean hesitated.

 

“Do you have a mom and dad, Dean?” she asked softly.

 

Dean swallowed hard. He wasn't sure what to say, what was okay to say. Dad was always so secretive when he was around, never giving his real name at places or to people, never talking about their lives before the fire. If Dean was meant to follow in his footsteps, in any way, shape, or form, he supposed—

 

“I have a dad,” he said.

 

“No mom?”

 

“My mom's dead.”

 

It sounded like something heavy and iron clattering out of his mouth. He resisted the urge to look back at Sammy, to see if he'd heard.

 

Miss Donahue's face fell open. “Oh. Well—I'm very sorry to hear that.”

 

Dean shrugged. “I was little,” he said, biting hard on his tongue, trying to sound less sad than the topic of Mommy really made him.

 

Miss Donahue looked down at her hands for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts. Then she said, “Dean, where is your dad?”

 

“Working,” was the immediate response.

 

“Where does he work? Can you tell me that?”

 

Dean shrugged. “He goes all kinds of places.”

 

“How long is he gone?”

 

“Depends.”

 

“He goes away for a long time sometimes, doesn't he?”

 

Dean nodded.

 

“How long has he been gone this time?”

 

“Two months.”

 

Her face fell open wider, her blue eyes getting big. Dean looked down at his knees, uncomfortable. He hated admitting to other people how weird his family was, how different from other kids.

 

“I see,” she said, clearing her throat. “And your aunt, the one you live with. Does she take good care of you?”

 

A bird trilled outside; Dean looked up at her.

 

He tried to decide if this was an opportunity. He thought of Liza, probably passed out with her blood full of drugs; he thought of how he was probably going to have to go next door to beg for dinner tonight, as there had been nothing left in the house that morning; he thought of how it still got cold at night, about the little patch of very white skin he'd found on Sammy's foot a few weeks before, in the damp beginnings of April, that he knew was frostbite. Here was Miss Donahue, who liked him. Maybe she could find Dad, call him, get him to come back and take them away from here.

 

But he hesitated. He twisted a little to look back at Sammy, who was looking at his hands on the surface of the desk, kicking his feet beneath it. He thought of how much Sammy was learning in his bright blue-and-red-and-yellow preschool classroom. He knew all his letters now, and his numbers, too. He could count to fifty. He could spell his name and Dean's name and Dad's name, though he still had trouble with _Winchester._ He knew his shapes. He could even read a little bit of Dr Seuss at the library. Dean knew he'd cry and scream if he got taken away from Miss Nancy and the safe, warm glow of the schoolroom, and it would break his little heart.

 

But Dean also knew that they couldn't stay with Liza Greyman anymore. It wasn't right; it wasn't safe. She was taking Dad's money and using it to buy her needles and her drugs and leaving them to fend for themselves.

 

Better to leave for a better place than to stay for the luxury of learning.

 

“No,” he said, before he could think twice.

 

Miss Donahue raised an eyebrow. “Does she feed you? Tuck you in at night, help you with your homework?”

 

Dean shook his head.

 

Miss Donahue's mouth went grim. “That's what I thought.”

 

“What do you mean?” Dean eyed her, a little warily.

 

“Well, Dean—it's clear that you and your little brother are being neglected,” she said. “I'm not the only teacher who has noticed it.”

 

“She does drugs,” Dean said, in a small voice. He felt a pang of guilt at that; it wasn't his secret to tell. But Miss Donahue's face contorted into a quiet kind of rage when he said it, and he knew he'd said something right.

 

“Well,” she said, sounding scandalised and angry. “Well.”

 

She sent them home, then, and stood in the doorway of her classroom with her fingers against her mouth as they left, hand in hand.

* * *

 

Two days later someone knocked loud and hard on Liza's door after school and, somehow, she managed to rouse herself from her stupor to answer it. Dean sat on the floor with Sammy, watching him draw a picture in the box on one of his assignments, and didn't care to see who she let in.

 

He looked up, though, when the door fairly burst open, and someone shouldered inside, shoving Liza hard against the wall. She let out a shocked noise and shoved at the person—big, black jacket—but didn't seem to move him much.

 

A face turned into the room. Dad.

 

He stood there in the front hall, looking over the sofa to the coffee table littered with syringes and spoons, to Dean and Sammy, doing homework on an overturned cardboard box; Dean stared at him, too shocked to say anything quite yet, and from his side Sammy piped up, “Daddy!”

 

It was the sound of Sammy's voice that seemed to break whatever spell was cast over their father, to rupture the skin containing the rage that was boiling in his face.

 

For an instant Dean was very aware of how they both looked. He'd gotten used to his thinness, and Sammy's too, but it hadn't gone away; he knew that both their faces were still gaunt and hollowed, that Sammy's once-cheerful expression was now perpetually drawn and sad, that both of them needed a bath and a change of clothes and a good hot meal and all of this was apparent in them both, kneeling on the cluttered floor with borrowed pencils in their hands and dirt beneath their fingernails.

 

“Dean,” said Dad, slowly—Liza was trembling against the wall behind him—“go and get your things.”

 

“Yes, sir,” Dean said, quiet, and he reached out for Sammy's bony hand. Sammy followed without protest, turning his head all the while to look back at Dad, until they'd gone into the back room where their clothes and empty bags were lying amongst trash and filth and the water-stained, blanket-less mattress.

 

Sammy watched while Dean went around picking up their things, and Dean let him zip the bags when he was done. From down the hall he could hear Liza's thin, tremulous voice, and the low, dangerous rumble of Dad's, building every minute.

 

Miss Donahue must have called him. She must have found his number in their enrollment records and told him that his children were under the care of a drug addict and to rectify the situation immediately or something like that and he'd come back, back from the Big Important thing, just as Dean had known he would.

 

He thought of Miss Donahue, and how he'd probably never see her again. He thought of Miss Nancy, who he'd only seen once, but whom Sammy loved with all his little heart. He gathered up their bags, helped Sammy slide his backpack on over his shoulders, and they stood near the doorjamb, Sammy's hand twined into the crook of Dean's elbow, until Dad exploded down the hall.

 

“You _worthless—!_ ” he shouted, and there was a thud, and Dean closed his eyes.

 

The rest of the shouting he couldn't understand, and he was glad about that. Dad came back down the hall for them eventually, and herded them both out of Liza Greyman's house, past her curled-up sobbing body on the sofa, and out into the sun.

 

They left that place behind.

 

* * *

 

 

They were well into Pennsylvania before Dean thought to look at the report card Miss Donahue had given him the day before.

 

He fished it out of the clutter in his backpack, and Sammy looked on with interest. The paper was wrinkled and folded, but Dean smoothed it out on his knee and took it in—Miss Donahue's clean black signature at the top, and the list of letters underneath.

 

_English: B_

_Math: C_

_Social Studies: B_

_Science: A_

 

“Dad,” Dean said, abruptly triumphant, feeling a flower of pride bloom in his chest. “Dad! I got an A in Science!”

 

But Dad only nodded once in the rear-view mirror, and Dean felt the flower wilting.

 

Not like it mattered, anyway. He'd never see Miss Donahue again, and if and when he got to school again, he'd have to start all over again.

 

Sammy took the report card from him and looked at it solemnly, though he couldn't read it, and then he smiled at Dean, a bright dimpled smile, as if with his own kind of pride.

 

Dean reached over and pulled his little brother close against his side, ruffled his curly hair, and Sammy giggled, pushed the report card back into his hand. Carver's Bridge had fallen far behind them; the low dark skies of Pennsylvania hung over them now, stormy, eating up the greedy road, swallowing up the blackness of the car, and both of them within it.

 

There were no more nannies after Liza Greyman.


	5. V

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

“I was thinking,” Lisa said—her fingers bunched up in a dish towel and stuffed into a drinking glass hovering precariously over the sink—“we should start deciding who to invite to Thanksgiving.”

 

Dean glanced up. The day's newspaper was flat on the kitchen table and there was ink staining his fingers where he'd been absently running them over the print.

 

_Local House Draws Paranormal Society's Interest._

 

“Hmm?”

 

Lisa's face lifted in the dark reflection of the window; across the street the sun was going down over Sid's house, a soft golden miasma splayed across their roof. “Well, I was going to invite my sister,” she said. Her features were warped in the tempered glass. “I know it's probably too soon for you to, um—if you don't want to reach out to, you know, old friends just yet I understand, but we could certainly have some over? If you wanted.”

 

“For Thanksgiving?”

 

“Yeah. Why not, you know?” Lisa turned on the tap, rinsed the glass, shunted it off again, placed the glass upside down on a towel on the counter. “Pretty dismal to just have the three of us.”

 

Dean cleared his throat, looked back down at the newspaper. The first few lines of the column were obliterated, smudged, but the picture was still unmarred—black and white, pockmarked newsprint. The Okoro family arrayed on their couch, all with grave faces. He was trying very hard not to actually read the article, but to simply let it blur across his eyes until he was satisfied and could throw it away with the rest of the Sports section and the movie reviews.

 

“What about, uh, what about your friend Cas?”

 

Dean blinked. Out of the corner of his eye he could see water running down the edges of the drying cups.

 

“He's a busy guy,” he said, neutrally. “Not really the sit-down-and-have-dinner type, you know.”

 

Briefly he pictured Cas sitting at their table, his coat bunched up in stiff angles, and nearly smiled. A few years, a few months ago, even, he'd have said yes just to see that with his own eyes—an angel puzzling over cranberry sauce. He'd have paid to be able to grin about that then.

 

“Don't you have an uncle up in the Dakotas?” Lisa asked, carefully, keeping her face turned down into the sink.

 

“He's not really my uncle. I dunno, Lis, I haven't talked to him in months.”

 

“You must have had acquaintances. Friends?”

 

“Lisa.”

 

She stopped working in the sink, let her elbows bend out and rest on either side of its basin. Dean pushed his forehead into his hand, watching the movement of his own fingers while they rubbed and pushed and blurred out the next paragraph of the article, then the next. He didn't look at her.

 

“We'll at least have Sid and Candace over,” she said, in the direction of the faucet. All the leeway for argument was gone from her voice; it was harder now, frustrated. “For drinks if not for dinner. They might have guests themselves.”

 

“What's wrong with just you and me and Ben and your sister?”

 

Lisa turned around, pivoting on her heels, and leaned back against the counter, the towel still tangled around her fingers. The gold of her watch-band glittered in the dim kitchen light.

 

“Dean—don't get me wrong—we love having you here,” she said. “God knows if we didn't you'd have been out on your ass a long time ago—no offense. But when I let you in? That night, after—”

 

She knew better than to complete that sentence. Dean flattened his fingertips against the article, all four, and pushed hard, skin rolling down under his blunted nails.

 

“I expected a guy with a hell of a lot of issues and a hell of a lot of grief, and I got that, and I still do. But—I mean, let's face it. You're kind of becoming a wall fixture these days and less of a human being.”

 

Now he looked up at her. His eyes felt heavy and tired and it took a moment for her to come into focus.

 

“Yeah?”

 

She shrugged, shoulders soft. “Yeah.”

 

Lisa sighed, came to the table, slipped into the chair where Dean had pictured Cas sitting a moment ago.

 

“You go to work, you come home, you sleep, and that's fine, but the last time you actually _did_ anything, we were out in that field and you were showing Ben his way around a rifle. And we had a lot of fun, okay, I'll admit that. It was fun. But since then—I would never ever presume to make light of your grief, Dean, but something happened. You're getting worse again. And I'm—I mean personally, I'm getting a little tired of our every conversation being about what's—what's wrong with you.”

 

Her cool, damp fingertips landed gently on the back of his smudging hand and he paused its motion, too ashamed, really, to look up at her.

 

“You know, I can't even ask about having company for Thanksgiving without being reminded that you're still in mourning—do you see? How that's frustrating?” She fell silent for a moment, as if waiting for him to respond, and when he didn't she gave an exasperated breath and settled her head into her other hand. “God, I sound like a bitch.”

 

“No,” Dean said, finally pushing the article away and setting his shoulders back. She met his eyes, apologetic. “No, no, you're not. You're right. I'm. No, you're absolutely right. It's okay.”

 

Lisa pulled her lower lip between her teeth and sighed.

 

“And I'm sorry,” he said; her disappointment was like a pinch at the back of his throat. “I am. I've been—I haven't been doing well and it's not fair to you and Ben, I'm not—I'm not being... _present._ And I should be, and I'm sorry.”

 

“You know all we want, all any of us want, is for you to be okay,” she said. “And nobody's going to fault you for grieving, but—after a certain point, we can't be your crutches anymore.”

 

Dean nodded.

 

She was right, after all. And it pained him to know that she felt like a crutch—he wasn't here just because he needed a hobbyhorse; he was here because he loved her, loved her son and her neighbourhood and what she represented, because someone else he'd loved more than anything had told him to find happiness here. He was still looking for it; he was sure it was here, in her kind hands washing dishes, in the sound of the school bus down the road at the corner, in the ticking of the clock at night. The calendar, flush with future, on her pantry door.

 

He needed to try harder to fit into this puzzle of a landscape. Lisa seemed certain that there was a hole his shape and size that he could lie down in, right next to hers. That was why he was here in the first place, wasn't it?

 

At their beginning the memories had scared him; now, though, he almost expected them, almost wanted them. They were like a drink of water on an empty stomach, just the barest thing to take the edge off of his hunger. Maybe, he thought—turning his hand over to grip her fingers lightly, smudge them with dark ink—maybe he could learn to control those, to live in and relish them, and then move on, be satisfied with them as an ode to his grief and then slip back into the flow of life unencumbered. Resign them to dreams or empty minutes amongst his blocks of careful hours.

 

They were memories of Sam, and Sam was what he needed. Painful as they were, as much as they gripped his heart and squeezed until it felt ready to burst, they were Sam—Sam before death, Sam before the blemishes and blackness, Sam with hope, Sam with dreams. There could be a place for that here, between the calendar and Lisa's lips. He could have both.

 

“I'll, uh.” He cleared his throat and let go of her hand. “I'll give my, um. Uncle in the Dakotas a call. See if he's free for the holiday.”

 

He smiled as best he could, a reassuring smile, and it seemed to take. Lisa returned it hesitantly, and then touched a hand to his face—an ink-stained hand, now that he had held it—and leaned across the table to kiss him.

 

“Good,” she said. “That's good. I hope he can make it.”

* * *

 

Bobby, it turned out, couldn't make it. Either he couldn't, or he wouldn't—Dean honestly wasn't able to tell over the phone.

 

“Maybe next year,” he said, grizzled voice cutting and jumping over the static of his shitty landline. He sounded optimistic, but also very sad, in a way that Dean heard and understood all too easily.

 

“That's fine,” Dean said, gripping the phone tight, looking down at the kitchen tile between his work boots. “Just, uh—have a safe holiday, yeah?”

 

“You too, son.”

 

And that was that. Lisa was disappointed, but she thanked him for trying. Definitely next year, she said. He would definitely come next year.

 

For his part, Dean was quietly glad that Bobby had turned down the invitation. He just couldn't imagine the holiday dinner going remotely well with the old man sitting there with them—almost as weighty a reminder of Sam as Cas was; he and Dean, two servings of sorrow alongside the turkey and stuffing—he wasn't inclined to make Lisa's Thanksgiving heavy with their grief. Let her sister come, he thought. Let Marissa Braeden light up the house with her too-bright smile and her obnoxious laugh for a day. At least she was impossible to ignore; Dean had only met her once, but knew well enough that she wasn't the type to let anyone's attentions wander for too long in her presence. With company he wouldn't have time to drift onto Memory Lane.

 

They were difficult to control, those memories, once he set his mind to it, once he'd decided that he wanted them after all. It was impossible to tell what to avoid to keep from triggering them. They seemed intent on coming out when he least wanted or expected them, instead of keeping to themselves until he was asleep or alone, but he was doing his best. When he felt the twitch in daytime he fought it down, focusing hard and close on the lamp on the side table or the passing telephone poles along the road, or on the sound of Lisa's fork against her plate. In the last week there'd been only flashes, really—scraps—once, an afternoon he'd spent looking out of a motel window, age eight, while the sun went down behind the empty buildings across the street, lighting up their jagged broken windows like teeth; Sammy had climbed up onto the chair next to him and rested his chin on Dean's shoulder. Four years old. Another time, while he'd been on break at work, a snatch of a day he'd spent wandering through the near-wilderness prairie with Sam, at the blunt edge of autumn—the wind whipping their faces. They'd come across an old shack and Dean had tugged the door open and released a swarm of blackflies into the tattered sky. They'd buzzed and raged like some Old Testament plague and he'd had to snatch Sammy away from the door to keep him from going in. It had smelled like death. When they'd gotten home—as much as the Days Inn was _home—_ he'd sworn Sammy to secrecy, and Sam had nodded solemnly, and as far as Dean knew (when he came back into himself, after it had passed), even up until the day Dad had died, Sam had never breathed a word about the dead thing in that shack.

 

He spared Lisa the tossing and turning as much as he could. Whenever he had the chance he'd creep downstairs to sit it out on the couch, in the dark, the streetlight casting hazy orange light through the curtains; he'd go back up exhausted but safe until the next one came again.

 

Thanksgiving came, and with it Marissa, and the day went much better than Dean could have predicted. Marissa was sensitive, if obnoxious, and refrained from asking heavy questions of him. Instead, over her glass of white wine, she asked about work, about coworkers, about the neighbourhood, about anything and everything that was safe and positive. He answered what she asked, declined wine in favour of beer, but he found himself smiling more than once, and found Lisa's face softening in his peripheral vision whenever she saw it.

 

Every adult in the house was a football fan, and while Ben kicked the pigskin by himself out in the side yard, the three of them sat bunched in on Lisa's couch crowing and pumping fists when the score was good, while the turkey roasted. Dean lost himself in touchdown dances and holiday commercials, neon-pink leaves and animated ads for Black Friday sales, the smell of the food cooking in the kitchen, the dull _thunk_ of Ben's foot hitting the football outside. All through dinner he was distracted and thus successful and Marissa stayed far later than usual, finishing off the boxed wine shoved into the refrigerator, laughing loudly about nothing in particular long after Ben had gone to bed.

 

Lisa invited her to stay the night as she was far too drunk to drive to her hotel, and Marissa accepted, and as Lisa showed her up to the guest room Dean got up to do his nightly rounds.

 

Everything settled into silence as he walked about the house; he paused in the kitchen to seal up some Tupperware full of leftovers, slide them into the fridge. He took out the empty wine box and unfolded it for the recycling bin and shoved it between the trash can and the counter to take out in the morning. Then he locked and deadbolted the back door, locked the window, drew the curtain. The calendar rose and fell.

 

When he went upstairs, finally, the door to the guest room was closed and the crack beneath was dark.

 

He got into bed, and Lisa's hand came up behind him to touch the back of his head, and he looked at her.

 

“Did you have a good day?” she asked, softly, sweetly, and he smiled.

 

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I did.”

 

He kissed her; the corners of her mouth tasted faintly of cranberry; he let her fold him into her arms, pressed flush against her chest, her knees in the crooks of his.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Blue Earth, Minnesota_

_January 1989_

 

Pastor Jim didn't say much when they arrived. He opened his door to them—Dad, Dean, and Sammy, haphazardly thrown into their coats and shoes—and his mouth turned down, but he let them in.

 

Dean was exhausted. His face hurt with cold and he felt, acutely, like something wrapping tight around his ribs and squeezing, Dad's disappointment.

 

In Pastor Jim's front hall, he stood meekly behind his father, looking down at the long dark runner rug. Dad was holding Sammy high up above him and Pastor Jim was standing in his bathrobe and ridiculous slide-on slippers waiting for an explanation and Dean wanted, most of all, not to be seen. He almost wished he could sneak backwards out the door and run off into the dark where Dad and Dad's anger couldn't find him. He'd freeze to death, he'd starve—right now that seemed like a much better option than standing another minute under this mountain of guilt.

 

Dad turned a little, and gently put Sammy down on the floor. He immediately trotted sideways, snatched Dean's elbow and pushed in against his side, burying his curly head below Dean's arm. Dean looked down at him, gripped his thin shoulder tight. At least Sammy wasn't mad at him. That was something.

 

“Dean,” said Pastor Jim, not looking at him, “you know where the back bedroom is, right?”

 

Dean nodded, then said, “Yes sir,” and Pastor Jim took a deep breath through his nose, looking hard at Dad.

 

“Why don't you go on back there,” he said.

 

Dean knew better than to protest. “Come on, Sammy,” he said softly, and hurried past Dad and down the hall. He didn't want to feel Dad's glare on the back of his head anymore tonight.

 

Pastor Jim's back bedroom was one of Dean's favourite places in the world. It was where they always slept when they were here, and they'd been here at least six or seven times in Dean's memory—the first time Sammy had barely been out of his crib.

 

It had a big soft bed with a wooden headboard, and an enormous cedar chest at the foot, and Dean always took out the big wool blankets and soft pillowcases from inside for them to sleep under and on, and these things smelled of kind wood and gentle smoke. Comfort. There was a rocking chair in the corner, an old-fashioned desk against the wall covered in papers that never seemed to be moved or organised at all, a crucifix over the bed; the light was sweet and dim; walking into the small silent box of this place always made Dean sleepy, and Sammy, too. It was like an invitation to rest.

 

He left the door open a little when they went inside, and Sammy yawned into his little hand and went to the bed, flopping down against its edge on his elbows.

 

The clock on the nightstand was old-fashioned and had fancy hands but Dean could tell that it was a little after one in the morning.

 

“Hey,” he said, and Sammy turned his head. “C'mere. Let me get your coat off.”

 

Obediently, Sammy came to him, and Dean crouched down to undo the toggles on his jacket. He could feel Sammy looking at him, his soft greenish eyes focused on the top of his head.

 

“Why did Daddy yell at you?” he asked, softly, lisping a little against his snaggletooth. Dean looked up at him.

 

“No reason,” he said.

 

Sammy sighed, frustrated, while Dean pushed his coat off his shoulders and over his hands.

 

“Why?” he asked again, insistent.

 

Dean swallowed. It was silent out in the front of the house. He tucked his hands under Sammy's arms and lifted him up onto the bed to undo his winter boots.

 

“Tell me why,” Sammy said.

 

“I didn't listen, okay?” Dean said, gritting his teeth, focusing hard on Sammy's boots and socks and his heels kicking against the mattress. “Dad told me to stay inside with you and I went outside. That's it.”

 

“Why did he have his gun?”

 

Dean closed his eyes, briefly.

 

It had once been so much easier to keep the truth from Sammy. When he'd still been a baby it had been simple to keep his mouth shut about monsters and hunts and things like that. But now, Sammy's silent streak seemed to be over—though he was still a quiet kid, he talked more, mostly to Dean, asked so many questions about anything and everything. Now, instead of pointing to interesting things out the window, Sammy grabbed his arm and let out a stream of wonderings— _what is that? Why is it yellow? Why is it there? What does it do?_

 

And now, now he was asking other things—bigger things. _Do we have a mom? How come we don't? Why do we drive so much? Why does Daddy have guns?_ And it was becoming harder and harder for Dean to know what to say.

 

Mostly he said, _stop asking,_ firmly, even though sometimes if he said it too sharply it would make Sammy cry—his big stupid greenish eyes would well up with big fat tears and his little face would crumple and he'd go off quietly into the corner to sit down and sulk, and Dean felt bad about that. But it was better, he thought, it was better that Sammy's feelings were hurt for a half hour every once in a while than the alternative. That was better than Sammy knowing the truth.

 

“He thought there was a, um. A burglar,” he lied, finally.

 

“What's a burglar?”

 

“A bad guy. You know. Stealing our stuff.”

 

“Did he kill him?” Sammy said, with quiet wonder.

 

Dean's heart twisted painfully.

 

“No,” he said. “No, but he scared him.”

 

“Is that why we had to leave?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Finally, Sammy was quiet. He yawned again, eyes squinting up, and he sat placidly on the bed while Dean lifted the heavy cover of the cedar chest and pulled out the heavy wool blanket.

 

Distantly, from the front hall, Dean heard raised voices, and he listened hard while he spread the blanket out and flipped it back for Sammy to crawl under.

 

“You left a ten-year-old,” Pastor Jim was saying—his usually gentle voice hard with anger—“with a _loaded rifle,_ with a five-year-old, for three days.”

 

“Was I supposed to leave them without protection?” Dad's voice, matching Jim's for rage. Dean drifted to the door, pressed his ear to the crack. In the corners of his eyes he could see Sammy settling down onto his stomach to sleep, face smushed against the pillow.

 

Jim scoffed. “You could have left them with _me_ , well away from any danger, or with a dozen other hunters—”

 

“Don't lecture me on how to protect my children.”

 

“Why shouldn't I? No one else is going to.” Dean heard something land hard on the table in Jim's kitchen. “You are not protecting them, John. You're throwing them into the shallow end of the pool and hoping they'll know how to swim. Sam could have been killed.”

 

“I had no idea it would come after them.”

 

“ _No idea?_ My God, you are blinded _—_ ” Jim stopped abruptly and lowered his voice. Dean had to strain to hear. “Of course it was going to come after your children. It knew you were onto it. When you learned that it fed on siblings you should have—I am shocked at you. Appalled.”

 

Dad said nothing, but Dean could feel his anger rippling through the hallway, pushing against the door he hid behind, a black shadow with long, reaching fingers.

 

“I advise you,” said Jim, “to go back and finish what you started.”

 

There was silence for a long time—the only sound the shifting of Sammy's body on the bed and Dean's breath touching and falling away from the door. Then the latch at the front of the house clicked, the brief sound of the late-night street and the whispering lamppost on the curb, and the latch fell home again. Dad was gone.

 

“Dean?” Sammy said, very softly.

 

Dean blinked, turned to him. In the soft light brushed against his little brother's face he looked warm, safe. It was hard to think that only a few hours ago he'd been wide-awake and scared in the harsh sharp glare of the motel lamp, little body curled up under thin cold motel sheets. Hard to think that anything black-cloaked and long-fingered had been bent over him, breathing his life away.

 

“You want Dog?” he said softly, and Sammy nodded, his curly hair catching on the pillow fabric.

 

Dean fished through Sammy's beaten old backpack for the feeling of Dog's rough embroidered nose and pulled the stuffed animal out. Dog's limbs were ragged and thin, the stitching at the inside of his leg pulling out, one eye missing, but Sammy took him out of Dean's hands and clutched him hard to his chest, curling his body up around him, yawning wide.

 

The door behind Dean creaked as Sammy's eyes fluttered closed.

 

“Dean?” said Pastor Jim's voice, low. “You boys all settled in?”

 

Dean turned his head. “Yes, sir.”

 

Jim nodded. His hair was just beginning to go grey, Dean saw, streaks of it in amongst thinning brown. He looked tired, tired and frustrated, but his mouth was soft when he looked at them—Sammy already half-asleep, Dean standing there beside him, one hand gently laid on his brother's shoulder.

 

“Get some sleep, then,” he said. “Your father won't be back for a few days at least. What do you boys like for breakfast? I can make pancakes, if you want.”

 

“Yes, please,” Dean said, and managed a smile. Pastor Jim was always good to them, when they came and stayed—they were always fed, always warm. He wished they could stay here longer than they usually did, but Jim was a hunter, and had his own jobs, as well as a parish to look after, and Dad always ended up taking them away from his comfortable house and kind hospitality after a few days.

 

“Alright, then. I'll be down the hall if you need me.”

 

Jim smiled, and gently closed the door, leaving it open a crack. When Dean looked back down at Sammy, he was fast asleep, hands loosely curled around Dog's body.

 

Down the corridor Jim's bedroom door closed with a click.

 

Dean pulled off his boots one by one, and his coat, and hung it carefully over a bedpost. Then he turned off the lamp and felt his way through the dark to the other side of the bed, climbed in next to Sammy.

 

His little brother's body was warm and pulled in tightly on itself and Dean wriggled close to that warmth, settling his head on top of Sammy's. His curly dark hair smelled like snow and soap and he was breathing, small shallow breaths, and his socked feet were cold against Dean's.

 

Dean gripped his arm gently, felt the knit of his sweater, the roughness of it.

 

The wind rustled outside in the trees against the window and he thought of the shtriga, its wide grey mouth, the blur of blue rising from Sammy's lips, its warped knotty fingers like twigs clutched in this same sweater. The sound of the rifle vibrating in his hands, the hum, the pulse of it against his palms, but never going off, too afraid in his grip to go off.

 

He'd been as frozen as if someone had surrounded him in ice. Too scared, seeing danger, real danger, killing his baby brother—too scared, knowing he'd failed, he'd messed up, he'd let this thing in, to fix the situation. Sammy had nearly died. _Died—_ before now he'd only had the _idea_ of Sammy's death, the concept, and it had seemed far-away and nonexistent. But now he'd seen it happening and he hadn't been able to stop it and Sammy was only breathing his shallow sweet breaths because Dad had come at the last moment and saved him.

 

Dean closed his eyes tight. They were hot and heavy with tears and shame. It wasn't Dad's job to protect Sammy—it was _his,_ and he'd botched it, and Dad was never going to trust him with his brother again, or at least not for a very long time.

 

He wouldn't ever, ever let it happen again. He promised himself that, listening to Sammy breathe. Never, ever again.

 

He put his arm down, pressed his hand flat against Dog's head and Sammy's chest. He could just barely feel Sammy's heartbeat through the cotton and the sweater. He shifted close until Sammy's bony little spine was curved against his stomach and then, only then, did he fall asleep.

* * *

 

 

_Willowick, Ohio_

_May 1989_

 

Sammy turned six years old on a bright May 2nd, and it was around this time that Dean began to realise that he was watching a person arrive in the world—that the baby he'd carried out of a burning house, the quiet toddler with curling hair and a gentle lisp, was beginning to grow into his name and into himself.

* * *

 

 

They lived in a house near a park overlooking the lake, a tumbledown old thing, its roofs and gables and gutters sagging from years and years of snow and snow-melt. A family who spoke Hungarian occupied the first floor and the basement, and Dad rented the top floor for five hundred dollars a month—two bedrooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom tiled all in cheap pink along its walls, papered over where it was not tiled in an obnoxious black wallpaper scribbled over with a print of silver perfume bottles and hairbrushes. Half of the tiles over the bathtub had come off the drywall and it shoved through, ugly, corrugated, and yellow-grey.

 

It was in this place that Sammy turned six—the first birthday he'd ever had inside the walls of a house.

 

Dad, miraculously, was home that day, and spent most of it asleep in an armchair the Hungarian family had given them when they moved in. He was hunting a violent spirit that was proving elusive, or so Dean understood when he leafed cautiously through the papers and books Dad left out on the glass-top kitchen table, and so he slept during the daylight hours and went back at it at night. Dean had a feeling the only reason Dad left him alone with Sammy here was because of the family on the bottom floor—an extra level of protection, perhaps, against anything coming for his children. The disappointment of Fort Douglas hadn't diminished; it still sat, like a popcorn kernel swallowed wrong, lodged in Dean's throat whenever Dad looked at him, whenever Dad left for the evening. It would be a long time, Dean knew, before Dad trusted him with Sammy through a night again.

 

It was a quiet day, May 2nd. A Tuesday. He and Sammy made the trek down the sidewalks to the elementary school in the morning and back in the afternoon. Summer was brooding on the other end of the lake that Willowick sat on, looming humid over them both, and Dean couldn't wait for the freedom it would bring—no more introducing himself in new classrooms, or puzzling out the differences between Sammy's teachers each time he drifted into a new first grade. Summer meant, invariably, heading south into hot places, long days in the car, new towns every week to explore; eating hamburgers in the back seat, Sammy giving blow-by-blows of the scenery; it meant that Dean would have countless hours to waste picking through desert scrub or mountain trees with Sammy trotting along behind, playing cowboys-and-Indians with sticks, discovering tiny caves or yawning, empty mineshafts and dropping dead cicadas in them; going off on his own, making his way back when it was dark, sleeping warm and tired all through the night to the sound of Dad cleaning his guns in the other room.

 

Sammy was a summer kid, and Dean had always thought so. Every time he turned another year it was on the cusp of that bright gold season, and he was always happiest in it. They came home, bounded up the stairs past the bickering downstairs couple shouting in their own language, and Sammy ran into the front room to throw his arms around Dad's neck where he slept and wake him from his stupor.

 

Dean heard Dad grunt and wake, the creak of the armchair, from the kitchenette where he bent over their backpacks, pulling out the worksheets for Sammy's math homework, laying them neatly, though crumpled, on the table.

 

“Daddy!” he heard Sammy say. “I'm six!”

 

“You're six!” Dad said, with something almost approaching pride, or at least good humour. “When did that happen?”

 

“Today,” Sammy said, lisping his laugh.

 

Dad's voice dropped, and Dean gave up on listening. He gnawed his tongue a little, quiet.

 

After a little while Sammy came into the kitchenette and looked down at his homework on the table, slid up onto the chair and gripped his pencil tight in his fist, set to work. Dean went into their bedroom and closed the door halfway, the book his teacher had assigned him tucked under his arm.

 

Sammy's birthdays were, while bright and promising at their start, inevitably stormy by their end, especially as he grew older. Eventually, Dean knew, he was going to hear his brother's voice supplicating Dad for cake, or a present, or even a balloon—the very basics that Sammy learned from cartoons and from the other children at school—and then he was going to hear one of Dad's excuses, the same set of excuses he used for Dean's birthday, too. _I don't have time to get a cake, I have work,_ was a common one. _I'm sorry, son, there's no room for any more toys in the trunk. Maybe next year._ No parties, no gifts, hardly even any well-wishes. He didn't particularly want to be in the room when this particular bomb exploded, tonight.

 

He could see the trees through his warped top-floor window, rushes of green all the way to the point where the ground crumbled down the cliff into the lake. Maybe, once Dad was gone for the evening, he'd take Sammy down to the park and they could pick their way to the shore through the rocks. He could fish some quarters out of the bottom of his backpack and buy them candy bars at the corner store. Not quite a cake, but better than nothing.

 

He didn't have long to wait for the explosion. He could hear a bird singing outside his window, and abruptly—like a teakettle going off—Sammy, bursting into indignation.

 

“How come we can't have cake?” His thin, piqued voice traveled down the hall, through the crack in Dean's door, and Dean quietly put his book down on his chest as he lay on the bed, and listened. “Jonah at school brought cupcakes for the whole class. Can't we have cupcakes?”

 

“Sam, I have to get going. I'm sorry. Maybe next year.”

 

“You say that every year, Daddy! You said it last year!”

 

“I do not have the money to be wasting on cakes we don't need.”

 

“But _everybody_ has cake on their birthday! I'm six!” And there were the tears—those were inevitable, too. They made his voice wet and bubbly and Dean felt a twinge in his heart. “I'm six, Daddy!”

 

The door to the stairs opened and closed. There was silence for a while, and then Sammy's low, long whine began, the baby-sound of his crying. He was six, but that hadn't changed.

 

Sammy was sitting at the kitchenette table when Dean went in, book forgotten; he was looking angrily down at his unfinished homework, face streaked with tears, his mouth twisted up. Dad was gone. The sun was level above the lake and shining in through the curtains, catching on the ends of Sammy's hair, the glint on his cheeks.

 

“Hey,” Dean said, gently, looking from Sammy's clenched fists resting on his legs to the abandoned pencil. “You finish your homework yet?”

 

Sammy scraped at his face with his fingertips. “No,” he said, bitten.

 

Dean swallowed. He looked out the window to the low green grass, the sun bending through the warped underside of the pane and the locks. He could smell the lake from here. The sound of Sammy's soft sniveling was making something catch hard in his throat, like a bony finger latching around his esophagus and clenching hard.

 

“You can finish it later,” he said, before he could stop himself, deciding halfway through his thought what he was going to do about this, this half-ruined birthday. “Go get your shoes on. Let's go outside.”

 

Sammy raised his reddened eyes to him; they'd grown a little wide, glistening.

* * *

 

The corner store was pleasantly busy when they reached it; the sun was pushing through the paint on the glass front windows, splaying in curves and letters, red and blue and white, across boxes of food and bottles of antifreeze stacked on sturdy metal shelves; jewel-glimmers of broken rays scattered against the refrigerated doors full of wine and liquor and soda pop. The young man behind the register smiled at them as they came in, Sammy's sandals slapping on the linoleum floor. Dean couldn't count how many times they'd been here in the two months they'd lived in the house by the lake—it was where Dad sent him with money for food nearly every night.

 

Dean shoved his hands down into the pockets of his shorts as the door sealed shut behind him; out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sammy look at him, and then mimic him, tucking his fingertips into the tops of his own pockets. He shook his long dark hair out of his eyes and looked around at the lollipop displays by the counter, the neat blocks of cigarettes behind the young man whose name-tag read _Emmett._

 

“Sammy. Come on.”

 

Sammy obediently followed him around the corner of the very last aisle, nearest the beer on its shelves, though he dawdled in Dean's wake—idly touching packets of beef jerky, making them swing on their hooks, or examining a box of sour candies with scientific interest. Dean let him dawdle. It was his birthday, after all. This place was no different than a thousand other gas stations and dollar stores in a million different places across this country, but Sammy seemed to know—or to guess—that Dean was fingering the change in the bottom of his pocket, that something was going to be bought for him. His face was brighter already.

 

On the last aisle were the packages of snack food: the kind of powdered donuts Dean remembered all too well as being his only breakfast for the months after the fire, plastic tubes of peanuts, packets of peach-flavoured gummies shaped like Os. He found what he was looking for under a shelf full of assorted candy bars.

 

“Hold your arms out, Sammy.”

 

Sammy was looking wide-eyed and eagerly at the veritable treasure trove of sweet things laid out before him. He didn't have to be told twice.

 

Dean pulled as many Ding Dong cakes from the display as he could fit in his hands, and pushed them into Sammy's arms. The packaging crinkled and crumpled and Sammy's face broke into a wide grin; he hoarded them to his chest, squishing them, staining the clear plastic with cream.

 

“I know it's not a real cake,” Dean said, apologetically, grabbing one more package for good measure and balancing it precariously atop the bunch in Sammy's arms, “but better than nothing, yeah?”

 

“Can we eat them all?” Sammy said with wonder, looking down at them.

 

“You bet.”

 

“Daddy's gonna get mad.”

 

“Dad,” Dean said, feeling a little push of pride in his chest, “doesn't have to know.”

 

He could have sworn, then—if only for an instant—that something glittered in Sammy's eyes, something mischievous and wonderful, and Sammy's smile turned toothy and gleeful, dimples poked into his cheeks.

 

Dean put a hand between Sammy's shoulders and guided him to the register, carefully holding his birthday prize, and Sammy stood on tiptoe to dump the cakes onto the counter. Emmett, handing a woman her packet of cigarettes and her change, glanced down at the sprawl with a raised eyebrow.

 

“Somebody's hungry,” he said, not unkindly, and gave Sammy a smile.

 

“It's my birthday,” Sammy said proudly, as Dean fished into his pocket for his quarters and dimes. “I'm six.”

 

“Oh, yeah?” Emmett sifted through the mound of Ding Dongs, trying to count them out. “Getting big, huh?”

 

Sammy didn't answer that, but pushed his hands back into his pockets the way he'd seen Dean do, and swayed back and forth on his feet, waiting for the haul to be paid for.

 

“Two dollars sixty cents,” said Emmett, looking to Dean for the money.

 

For a moment, Dean worried he wouldn't have enough—the thought of having to return even one of those packages to the display made him cringe inwardly with shame—Sammy deserved every one of those things, and he'd walked all this way intending to give his little brother _something_ of a birthday, and he was going to do it. But then he found a stray dime in his back pocket, coming just up against the sixty cents, and Emmett slid the coins across the counter to count them in his palm.

 

Sammy carried the plastic bag of cakes out of the store, holding it up in his arms beneath his chin, and Dean watched him walk proudly out in front of him, through the glittering door into the hot parking lot where the air smelled of the muddy lake water and the sunshine on the road. He knew, even without seeing Sammy's face, that his dimpled smile was big and strong.

 

 _I did that,_ he thought, for a brief moment. _I made him happy._

* * *

 

They climbed precariously down the steep cliff-side to the shore of the lake, sitting and sliding down over the rocks, tearing up Queen Anne's Lace flowers with their passing shoes. They weren't allowed down here—no one was—but the sun was beginning to drift down, and no one was walking through the park above in the between-hours of evening. The plastic bag of Ding Dongs rustled all the way down.

 

Dean stopped Sammy a little ways above the water where it rushed and broke against the rocks. It was choppy for such a still day, and the air down here was cool and thick. They perched on a long flat stone, the bag between them, and Dean tore open each package to hand it to Sammy.

 

Sammy was quiet while he ate, and Dean watched him—half-observing the lifting, breaking muddy-green water, half-looking out to snag Sammy if he happened to slip off the rock—and thought, abruptly, what a different kind of quiet it was now. Years ago, in the days of Ms Chancey and her tall lonely house, that had been fear-quiet—a distrust in Sammy for anyone but his brother, maybe some latent notion of the dangers of their little lives, a kind of armour for his fragile baby body, but now it wasn't fear-quiet—now it was a personal kind of silence, Dean thought, a startlingly grown-up kind of silence, almost the same kind of pensive, thoughtful tranquility he sometimes saw on Dad's face. Sammy brought his knees up to his chest and bit neatly into cake after cake and watched seagulls prowl and dive above the water, the occasional wind off the lake pushing his dark hair away from his face, and for once, Dean couldn't tell what he was thinking about.

 

For the last five years, Dean thought—sliding his sandals off against the edge of the rock, feeling the cool stone beneath his feet—he'd always imagined Sammy as a sort of extension of himself—another part of his own body or mind that he had to take care of, just like everything else. Now, though, in these last months, Sammy was becoming his own sort of thing, and Dean could feel him pulling—like Dog's threadbare legs—away from his stitches.

 

Dean was well-used to birthdays passing unnoticed, letting them come and go in silence, only marking down their existence in his mind as a treasure he himself could keep—another year of being alive—but Sammy—Sammy pushed back. It was only cake that he'd asked for from Dad, only a single gift that he wanted, that he couldn't have; but he'd _demanded_ it, as if he were desperate to be treated just like the children who sat on either side of him in class, as if he were absolutely certain that he not only wanted but _deserved_ those things, and Dean thought (silently, to himself) that he wasn't _wrong._

 

He was too young to understand that being deserving didn't mean that one always _got._ But he knew the unfairness of it—he knew it in a way that surprised Dean, a little. He'd had his fair share of rebellions towards Dad in these last years, but ultimately Dad won out, too big, too intimidating, too in-charge to be fought; but Sammy seemed to be just getting started, just discovering his own little voice, no longer hindered too much by a lisp, discovering that he could speak when he wanted or didn't want, and though Dad was still too much of a mountain to be moved, Sammy seemed to feel that potential where Dean had lost it long ago.

 

It scared him, in a way, how quickly and smoothly, how intelligently, Sammy seemed to be growing into his own skin, his own mind. Not because he didn't love him—not because of the quiet, vicarious thrill he felt, sometimes, when this tiny boy stood up to that big, big man, however fruitlessly—but because he worried that someday there would come a disappointment too big for Sammy's fragile shoulders, or an act of rebellion that would turn around and hurt him too deeply.

 

Sammy reached down into the bag and fished out one of the last packages of cakes. He held it out to Dean. It was smashed inside, sticky. “You want one?”

 

Dean smiled. “Thanks.”

 

He picked out the chocolate bits that hadn't been plastered to the bag with cream, sucked the crumbs off his fingers.

 

After a long time of quiet he said, “So, uh—good birthday?”

 

Sammy nodded, his sharp glittering eyes like chips of mica watching the rolling of the water, a gull plummeting to snatch a fish from the surface.

 

He looked down, then, swiping a finger into the last of the plastic packages to catch the remains of the white cream. “Dean?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“How come Daddy always says we can't have cake on our birthdays?”

 

Dean sighed, leaning back against the rock above theirs. It jutted into the back of his head, half-painful. “'Cause he's always gone on our birthdays.”

 

“Not all the time.”

 

“Yeah, but when he is there, he never has money.”

 

Sammy crumpled the package and threw it towards the lake. It drifted down a few inches away from their feet. “Where does Daddy get money? For our house and stuff. And food.”

 

“He has a job.”

 

“What job?” Sammy turned his head.

 

Dean swallowed. It never got any easier to lie.

 

“He's a mechanic, Sammy. You knew that. He fixes cars and stuff.”

 

“Why is he gone so much?”

 

This, too, was different. No longer the _why? why? why?_ of little kids who only kept at it for attention; now Sammy's _whys_ were smarter, sharper, intent, and Dean was having a particularly hard time, lately, of avoiding those particular arrows.

 

“Because. People's cars break down a lot. All over the place.”

 

“Then why doesn't he ever have any money for cake and stuff?”

 

“Because he _doesn't,_ Sammy.”

 

“That's not fair.”

 

Dean thought of Dad, probably hunkered down in the car, lying in wait for the prey of his hunt, waiting for darkness to drop with a cocked gun somewhere. Working, working, working, always moving, always looking, always busy, with nothing to show for it—no money; no Monster; no revenge—only the constant motion, the changing, shifting schools, the endless miles of road. The disappointments.

 

“No,” he said, feeling at a loss, suddenly darkened, dampened. Helpless, even. What else could he say? “It's not.”

* * *

 

They stayed out by the lakeside until the stars were coming in, and then they climbed back up the stony hill and walked home, in past the Hungarian family up to the dark, humid second floor.

 

Sammy fell asleep on Dad's armchair in front of the old TV set long before Dad came home, early that dusky next morning. From his own curled-up position against the arm of the couch, just barely waking, Dean watched the great shadow of his father bend down to kiss the top of Sammy's head, outlined by the salty streetlight, a spectre. He felt angry, acutely, for a sharp instant before he fell asleep again—angry that Sammy had to be asleep for Dad to love him, to touch him like fathers were supposed to touch their children, angry that he'd had to use all his quarters to give his brother a birthday, angry that he hadn't heard the door at the top of the stairs open in his dreams.

 

When he woke again, in grey light, to rouse Sammy for school, he felt cold and calm again.

 

It was no use dwelling on things like that.


	6. VI

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

December marched slowly, greyly in. It brought black slush with it, sleet-rain that slashed and hissed under the tires of Dean's truck, sparkling as if inwardly with the golden orbs of streetlights. The air was bitter. He drove.

 

The Braeden house was a restless, hulking thing, he found, in these new cold months. It had a tendency to blend into the low sky when he pulled up in the drive in the evening, a proclivity to sink into the clouds, to loom, as if any moment it would come crumbling down and rush him back away into the street. Lisa and Ben didn't seem to notice, and why would they? It was only their home. But Dean hesitated longer and longer in the white cab of the truck, looking hard at its shutters and windows, trying to decide whether or not he was really welcome here anymore.

 

In the week after Thanksgiving he realised he'd lost the ability to make blocks out of the days. Those careful sections of time didn't seem to matter anymore, or at very least seemed less imperative than they once had. There was no point in rationing minutes and hours when the things he'd wanted to avoid in June and July and August and September were making themselves comfortable in his mind whenever they pleased, now, uncurling and unfurling like morning glories opening to meet the sun when he least expected them. No point in fighting their spontaneity, especially now that he'd come to terms with their existence.

 

So he'd been adrift, really, since Thanksgiving, since winter had begun to bear down, since Lisa had made it clear she wasn't inclined to keep his grief in the guest room into another year. He didn't fault her for that, though he dwelled on it sometimes, held it briefly in his mind before letting it evaporate again—wondered exactly how bad it looked, on the outside. Probably worse than he'd thought. And he felt a pressure in the house that came not from the Braedens but from somewhere in himself, maybe, a grip around his ribs pushing him out into the cold, to stumble feebly away or towards or into something that he didn't have a name for yet. Tonight, he drove.

 

He'd told Lisa he was going for beer with Sid, after making sure Sid's own truck wasn't in his driveway, and pointed the white hood down the street and drove. The suburban streets were slick with half-liquid ice, and mostly empty for that very reason. His headlights caught on glimmers of snow, lonely flakes falling without purpose or point.

 

Dean wasn't sure where he was going, exactly, or if he had any destination in mind at all; but when he ended up on Caplin Street, parked by the corner, picking the blue of the Okoro house out against the night sky, he couldn't find it in himself to be surprised.

 

He killed the ignition, let the dark collapse on him, looked out idly.

 

There was a tremulous, curtained light in their downstairs front window, a fragile, flickering glow. Upstairs the house vanished into the black sky, closed-up windows and silhouetted rooftops. He sighed, relaxed into his seat.

 

 _Haunted._ It was still hard to believe. But there had been that article in the newspaper a while ago, the family's shameful faces arrayed on the couch—and that old gut feeling never quite went away no matter how long he slept in Lisa's bed. Something was off about this place, even if he couldn't put his finger on it.

 

The cold was beginning to creep metallic into the truck; he pulled his arms close to his chest for warmth and blinked slowly.

 

What was he doing here? It wasn't like he was going to sit here all night, as if on reconnaissance. There was nothing to do reconnaissance on. He was a civilian now, or he was supposed to be, and civilians didn't park on the street and watch houses at night; that was what the police liked to call _stalking._ And even if this place was haunted—which he wasn't sure it was—it was highly unlikely anything would happen tonight.

 

Maybe if he stayed out here long enough a memory would come.

 

Dean turned his head a little, looking for himself in the side mirror where the streetlight hit its edge. He sighed.

 

Even in the nighttime he could see the bags under his own eyes, the gaunt pull of his skin around his sockets. It was hard to find rest in sleep when his sleep was so jumbled and toppled and brimming over with Sam, with that tall house in Willowick, the cedar chest at Pastor Jim's. That morning he'd even entertained the thought of using the bottle of Lisa's cover-up, sitting on the counter-top in the master bathroom, to hide the shadowed flesh beneath his eyes—two or three shades darker than his own skin, certainly, but he'd picked it up anyway, turned it over in his palm—put it back in the end.

 

But he was fooling himself, he thought, if he pretended he didn't enjoy that exhaustion in the morning just a little bit.

 

He'd busted a thumb open with his hammer at work the other day. Broken the nail right off, smashed the top of the bone. It was wrapped up, set to heal, but it had been a careless mistake. He'd been thinking of the time Sam had brushed a loose tooth right out of his mouth, five years old or so, and the bloody foam around the drain of the yellow motel sink. He hadn't been paying attention.

 

The tremulous light in the Okoro house went out, quietly. Stillness fell.

 

There was nothing here for him.

 

He sat there for a long time, until he thought he could almost feel the heartbeat of the hands moving inside his watch, and when he finally bothered to look it was nearing ten o'clock.

 

Dean drove past the house before he turned around in the cul-de-sac, idled behind its mailbox for a moment, looking up at it. It was strong-faced and silent, as if staring him down. Dissatisfied, though with what, he didn't know, he drove home.

* * *

 

Hamilton County Public Library did not have many books on the occult in its small, back-corner reference section, and had no books at all on how to retrieve a soul from the Cage of Hell. Not that Dean had expected to find one. But he looked anyway.

 

He was too restless to go home, too bothered by the looming of the house. Work had been cut short—the first driving winds of a snowstorm were coming in, making construction on the outside of the site impossible—but he wasn't ready to park the truck in the driveway and consign himself to the pale hallways and warm bed upstairs just yet. By all accounts the weather was preparing to get fierce, and would continue ferociously all week. He was going to be stuck inside until next Thursday at least.

 

He was here at the library for that reason, trying to find something, anything, to tide him over those long arcing silences that would inevitably fill the Braeden house once the snow descended. He didn't mean to wander into the reference books, into the aisle marked _O – Occult P – Paranormal R – Religion._

 

But once he was there, he couldn't help trailing his fingers over the Dewey Decimal stickers, the rough, hard-bound spines—light, amateur stuff, for the most part; nothing nearly as heavy-duty as he was used to. Hobby-witchcraft. _Ghosts of the Northwest. Devils & Demons: A Guide. _He slipped that one out of its shelf, paged through it. The chapter titles were in a gooey, cheesy Halloween-style font. It was nothing of substance.

 

The shelves ran out almost before they began, but he touched the spine of every book—trying to tell himself loudly at the front of his head that he was only looking out of morbid curiosity, black humour, seeing what passed for civilian knowledge these days. But it was hard to ignore the distinctive rise and fall of his heart every time an emblazoned title looked vaguely promising, or seemed to say, _there's an answer in here, to get your brother back._

 

Once, a long time ago, he and Sam had had a pact. If one was gone, the other was forbidden to look. It was a stupid pact, one neither of them had ever upheld; but even years ago, on that horrible wet night when Sam had knelt in the mud of Cold Oak and breathed his last into Dean's shoulder, even then Dean remembered the sound of the pact knocking around in his head, chasing him down the asphalt to the crossroads whispering _no! you promised!_ But he'd broken it then; Sam had broken it in turn; it could scream and cajole all it liked but ultimately it was never listened to. Eventually.

 

But here it was again—his finger was crooked against the spine of a book titled _A History of Necromancy,_ a long-shot even by his standards, to be sure; and a small voice murmuring below his ear, _don't do it, don't even try. You'll only disappoint yourself. You swore. You promised him._

 

Dean sighed, let his finger slip away.

 

He leaned for a moment against the opposite shelf, books pushing into his back, and looked up at the rectangle of fluorescent light in the ceiling. A fly was trapped inside, a dead black smudge in the corner.

 

But if he didn't try, if he didn't at least make the cursory effort, what kind of person was he? Did Sam—was he really expected to live life knowing that the person who'd sent him on this course was, at this moment, pinned like an insect, like a dead fly, down there, suffering pain _so_ unimaginable—

 

He pulled his eyes away from the light, pried himself away from the reference section, grabbed the first Stephen King novel he could find, checked out at the front with his head ducked and his mouth tight. The burning in his eyes, he decided, was from staring at the light for too long. Absolutely.

 

His face was dry by the time he got home, through the ice and the driving wind. That was something, at least.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_1989_

 

At the end of May the Willowick house was far behind and near-forgotten. They drove into the heat of the summer creeping up over the country, stealing into the northern states like a gale forcing long grass down, showing its shivering silvery underside to the sky.

 

In Oklahoma Dad fought a poltergeist and they lived for a week and a half in a room with a big window and a big window-ledge, and Sammy sat in its corner every day, scribbling in his one and only colouring book with his green crayon, or watching cars pull in and out of the parking lot, watching the lady down the way who wore short jean-skirts sit on the parking buffers all afternoon, waiting for men in cars. They only stayed long enough for Dad to get a nasty cut across the brow that he stitched up in the mirror over the sink that didn't work.

 

As they made their way west into New Mexico a tornado touched down, far away, so distantly back down the highway that Dad thought it safe to pull over, and they clambered out, all three, to lean on the hood of the car and watch it come down—first a slim finger of dark cloud, stark against the sick green sky, and then a grinding column of wind and wood and scrap metal, monstrous—but so distant that its roar was dim and Dean could only hear the gale in his own ears rushing east, could only watch as the twister ploughed its way across the plains away from them, furrowing into the Earth, plundering its path. He watched it devour a windmill, watched sparks of electricity pop and light and die within it, and when he looked down at Sammy, his brother's eyes were as wide as silver dollars and glinting just as brightly, fixated on the monster with just as much awe as terrible fear.

 

A corner cut through New Mexico and they sped into Colorado, through tall green mountains, perilous winding roads, sheer cliff to one side and steep climb to the other. Dean pushed Sammy across the back-seat towards the mountain-side of the road. If they plunged off the road he would be on the safer side of the car.

 

Two weeks of homelessness in the heights of the Rockies; they slept in the car at night under a blanket Dad kept in the trunk, and in the daytime, while Dad plied locals and spotty small-town records for information on the vicious hillside deity that was stealing children away, they wandered foolishly and carelessly into the steeps, through the dark sun-pierced crowded woods on the mountainsides, through the smell of pine and the hum and rattle of birds and bugs. Dean carried his BB gun under his arm, just in case, though the god on Dad's kill-list never attacked in sunlight, and he followed Sammy through animal tracks that it seemed only his brother could see, up thin ravines to staggered rocky outcroppings from which they could see for miles and miles, through the endless mutilated spines of the Earth pushing through; whether they were looking east or west, Dean never knew. Invariably, they ended up lost, but somehow—whether by good luck or good intuition—they always found their way back to the car by nightfall.

 

They saw a deer once, up there, in the mountains. She was creeping through the underbrush as if fearing to wake the world. They stood there—Dean with his gun, Sammy's eyes glimmering like chips of green mica—watching her, and for a moment she stopped and watched them, her own big eyes the colour of chocolate or dark mud, her soft ears pricked. Then she darted away, and they listened to the sound of her bounding through the forest, breathless, until it was gone.

 

It was cold at night, but Sammy curled up between the seat-back and Dean's body and was always warm enough.

 

From the town where the car was parked, where Dad was hunting, when Dean looked up at the peaks and the clouds settling on them like white hats and sometimes the blue storms rolling down them like marbles rolled down anthills, sometimes he imagined that if he ran hard and fast enough he could climb to their very tops in only minutes. He felt strong enough, brave enough, to do that.

 

It was east, then, east down through the Texas panhandle and then back up into different mountains, into Kentucky, and by now it was early July, and as soon as Sammy learned to read the long word on the brown government signs he said it constantly as if he liked the taste of it in his mouth: _Appalachia._ A family who lived behind a chicken-wire fence and pried coal from the highway-sides with pickaxes let them stay in the trailer behind their house for a few days while Dad tracked down a pair of ghouls haunting the hills. The trailer was dark and smelled like piss and the family in the house burned tires in the grass, huddled round the sick black smoking things to talk with voices so thick and accented that Dean couldn't understand them. Dad was loathe to leave them in that place when he was gone, so he took them up the twisting wet highway to a low flat white building in a hollow with a black cross on its door.

 

It was a Methodist church, and there were old women who sounded like birds in there every day, and they were more than happy to look after him and Sammy. They gave them bright yellow lemonade that stung with sugar and stale old cookies and while they ate the old women converged around an ancient player piano and a few black music stands and sang, warbling, practising tunes that sounded older than the mountains themselves. Sammy wandered around the church for hours, peering up at the warped picture of Jesus in a frame by the door, or listening to the women practise their harmonies, or pretending to read the hymnal books placed under every blue plastic chair in the sanctuary. Dean didn't like the church much; he sat outside on the stoop more often than not, listening for cars coming up the road, counting the number of pickup trucks he saw, watching ants meander across the concrete into cracks where they made their homes.

 

North, far north, to New Hampshire, and then to Vermont, and then to Maine—well into August they bounced around New England, a new motel every week or so. Hunts pouring into Dad's lap. Sometimes Dean saw him scribbling furiously in his journal, crouched over it on the kitchenette table by the light over the counterpane. Dean learned how to do laundry in those places, and he and Sammy hung their wet things over the rail of the shower curtain or the rack above the sink, to save the quarters the laundromat dryer would have required. Their clothes came out wrinkled and smelling like damp, but they were clean.

 

There was danger. Dad caught a shapeshifter in Massachusetts as it was on its way to the hotel where Dean was asleep next to Sammy, and Dean only learned of it the next morning, as Dad was washing the blood and skin off his silver knife in the sink. His heart rose into his throat and didn't come down until Massachusetts was far in their rear-view mirror. Sometimes he forgot how vulnerable they were.

 

He began to latch and double-lock the doors at night and sprinkle salt on the threshold, in those flimsy-walled rooms, to keep his BB gun next to him in bed, safety on, resting at his back like a third child, his body a wall between it and Sammy's sleeping.

 

August blurred into September blurred into Florida, Georgia, a long trip into the Carolinas chasing an elusive water spirit, and Sammy began to ask more questions, ask them more in earnest, with greater frequency. _Where did Dad go? Why do we have to leave?_ He liked his second-grade teacher in North Carolina a great deal and when Dad dragged them both away again after only three weeks in the new school he pestered Dean for ages: _why can't I go to school with Miss Adley? Why? Why?_

 

It was frustrating, and Dean began to lose patience, angry both at Sammy for poking and prodding at the things he just couldn't know and at Dad for insisting on this stupid secret. Why, he wanted to ask his father, why can't Sammy know even just a little bit of the truth? But Dad was tired and had a short fuse and Dean kept his complaints to himself.

 

His answers to Sammy became short and snide and he hated himself for the expressions of annoyance they called up on his brother's face, but they at least tempered the stream of questions. Sammy gave up asking a lot of things.

 

Dean gave him haircuts, sitting on the edge of the bowl of the sink, once every few months. Kept his hair long and dark and soft but cleaner, neater. For himself he used Dad's electric razor to buzz-cut the sides of his head, to keep cool in the blistering southern heat.

 

Summer closed up and they trekked for days across the Midwest up into Montana to a quiet, dust-blown town with a demon problem, and it was the first Dean had heard of demons in a long, long time. Perhaps that was why they stayed three months there, why Sammy got to finish a whole semester of second grade at the miniscule elementary school, why Dean got to bring home two report cards before they left again. Maybe Dad was on to something there, something about the Monster, the capital-M thing that had killed Mommy—God, a fire and a fear that now, to Dean, felt ancient, like something he'd read about in a history textbook. He could still feel the heat and the fright on his face if he dwelled too long upon it but he could no longer remember the smell. But Dad, he knew, still felt the empty hole where their mother had been as acutely as if it were a bullet hole in his own breast and he lingered in Noxon until it was freezing blue Christmas and his pen wore straight through the pages of his journal.

* * *

 

_1990_

 

Whether or not he learned anything there, Dean never knew. But on New Year's Eve he packed them up and they drove through the night to Washington, to a sweet, kind-faced motel overlooking the sea, and Dad disappeared into the woods hunting a Black Dog and that was where Dean met Hettie.

 

She was only twelve—two years older—but she lived down in Room 608 with her mother and every day Dean saw her sitting out on the parking buffer smoking cigarettes.

 

It was Sammy, really, who approached her first. He and Dean were tossing an old tennis ball they'd found back and forth, their breath frosting in the cold, too cabin-feverish to sit inside the warm room for too long at a time, when Sammy stopped, holding the ball in his mittened hands—the mittens with the holes in them—and he ran over to her where she sat, in her bobble-hat and braided pigtails, sucking on a light like every middle-aged chain-smoker Dean had ever seen, and proffered the ball to her.

 

She stamped out her cigarette with the bottom of her boot and joined them quietly, tossing the ball back and forth in a loose triangle, having been neither greeted nor truly invited; it wasn't strange; things just happened that way. When they grew tired of it Sammy wandered back to her buffer with her and Dean followed, and he watched her sit back down, smack snow off her coat, and light another cigarette with an old blue plastic lighter.

 

“Pretty sure you're too young to smoke,” was the first thing Dean ever said to her, and she looked up at him with eyes the colour of ice.

 

“Nobody gonna care,” she said. She had a gap in her teeth and her rough-chiseled accent belied how far away she was from wherever she came from. “Ain't nobody out here 'cept y'all, y'all ain't gonna tell.” The end of her cigarette flared and she breathed the smoke out through her nose.

 

“I'm Dean,” Dean said, stuffing the tennis ball into his coat pocket. “That's Sammy. He's my brother.”

 

“I'm Hettie.” She coughed her name. “Hettie Blue Jones.”

 

“Blue Jones,” Sammy repeated.

 

“'At's my middle name,” she said. Smoke left her nose like the huff of a dragon. “Blue. Like the colour.”

 

Every day when they came back from the school—a dark, mean place, flat grey brick and bars on the windows and teachers with yellowed teeth—Hettie Blue Jones was sitting on her parking buffer, the door to her room closed. She didn't seem to go to school; she didn't seem to do much of anything. She just smoked cigarettes, and Dean didn't even know where she got them, or why her mother never seemed to come out of that room to rebuke her or call her inside.

 

“Why are you living here?” he asked her, once, crouched on the buffer with her, tasting the smell of her smoke on his tongue. Sammy was making snow angels in the dead lawn a ways away. “Don't you got a house?”

 

“My daddy's the guy who puts Bibles in motel rooms,” Hettie said, picking something off her tongue and flicking it into the snow. “He ain't never home. We're from Alabama.”

 

“I've been to Alabama. Sammy too.”

 

“You ever seen a alligator?”

 

“No.”

 

“I seen a alligator,” she said, “once.”

 

She was quiet for a long time, looking down past the rumbling town to the grey beach and the grey waves and the grey sky. Dean had never been so close to the ocean before.

 

“My mama's real sick,” she said, finally, “like, she got the cancer. She ain't never seen the ocean and it's, like, her dying wish, or whatever. So we come up here. We're waitin' on my daddy. He gonna come meet us. He's leavin' Bibles in California.” _California_ on her cold tongue had five syllables. _Ca-li-for-nee-uh._

 

“I'm sorry about your mom,” Dean said, unsure what else to say.

 

Hettie shrugged, directed her eyes at the ground between her boots.

 

“My mom died,” Dean said quietly, after another moment. It hurt to say, like a pinch in his mouth. He swallowed.

 

“Sorry 'bout that,” she replied, flat.

 

Sammy liked Hettie, more than he'd ever liked a stranger before in Dean's memory. He didn't talk to her much, but he gravitated towards her in the parking lot whenever they were outside, sitting at her feet, writing out his ABCs in the snow. One day when Sammy was inside dutifully doing his homework and Dean was alone with her in the cold air she asked him, abruptly, “You been saved?”

 

“What?”

 

She coughed, cleared her throat, let her cigarette dangle between her thin, ungloved fingers. “You been saved? You got Jesus?” She peered at him, her eyes narrow slits. “You and your brother, you been saved?”

 

Dean shrugged. “I don't think so.”

 

Hettie grunted. “Y'all oughta get saved.”

 

Dean shifted uncomfortably, searching out the distant ocean from beneath the heavy cotton weight of the January clouds. His eleventh birthday was coming up, soon. In a week or two, now.

 

“See,” Hettie said, gesturing to the parking lot and the street and the buildings across the street with her cigarette, “my daddy reckons, world's gonna end soon, you know? Like, New Millennium?” Another word she punctuated, _mill-en-ee-um._ “Figure, y'all oughta get saved, else y'all gonna end up, you know.” She stuck her light back in her mouth and fumbled her shaking hands into her pockets. “H-E-L-L,” she said, around the stub between her teeth.

 

Dean frowned. “Why?”

 

“'Cause y'all sinners.”

 

“We're not sinners.”

 

“Everybody's sinners,” she said, shrugging. “Just gotta get saved, get Jesus. I been saved. If y'all are still here when my daddy gets here he might could baptise y'all. He can do that. He got Jesus.”

 

“I don't think I believe in Jesus,” Dean said, feeling sour. Mommy had believed in Jesus, he remembered, Jesus and angels, and it didn't seem they'd done her much good.

 

Hettie scoffed. “You dumb, boy.”

 

“I'm not dumb!”

 

“What about your little guy? He believe in Jesus?”

 

Dean looked back towards their room, at the closed red door with the 618 on it in black placard letters.

 

“I dunno,” he said, low, annoyed. “He's only six.”

 

“Well, if y'all are still here, y'all should let my daddy baptise him. Ain't no use some little baby goin' to the Fire.” She got up, dusted ash and snow off her jacket, turned to go inside her own room.

 

Dean scowled at her back as she fumbled with the key. Who was she to act like she knew anything about him, about Sammy? He didn't even think he believed in Hell, or God, or the Devil, or anything like that. He certainly wasn't going to let some hokey motel-Bible-dumper come and pour water on his brother's head and act like it meant anything. He didn't like the way she talked, as if she knew everything there was to know.

 

“Sammy's not a baby,” he said, as defiantly as he could. “He's six.”

 

Hettie went into her room and closed the door.

 

Dean sat, annoyed, on the buffer, looking at the patterns her cigarette ash had made in the snow. His face was getting cold.

 

Sammy was probably getting antsy in the room by himself; he didn't like it, recently, when he was away from Dean for too long. He seemed to go through waves, inclined to wander by himself one month, practically attached to Dean's hip the next. Not that Dean minded. Just another reminder that Sammy was growing in strange crooked ways into someone different, someone new.

 

The sound of a latch; Dean turned his head. Hettie Blue Jones came back out, closed the door carefully, walked slowly to the buffer and sat down next to him and pulled another cigarette out of her pack.

 

Dean looked hard at the dollar store across the street, hoping she could feel how irritated he was with her. He decided that if she said another word about Jesus he was going to get up and go inside and not speak to her again until she could talk about something other than that.

 

Out of the corner of his eye he watched the glowing stub of her cigarette dwindle halfway until it was almost to the filter, and then she pulled it out of her mouth and breathed out her smoke.

 

“My mama's dead in there,” she said, matter-of-factly, and coughed a little.

* * *

 

Dean went inside when the ambulance came, and the gurney with the black bag came out of Hettie Blue Jones' room. He closed the blinds and the curtains before Sammy could look out and then sat down next to him on the bed where he was wrapped up in a blanket watching cartoons.

 

Sammy didn't greet him, but leaned sideways to push his head against Dean's arm, and Dean put it around him tight.

* * *

 

They left Washington before Hettie's father could come, before he could baptise anybody. Dean turned eleven before they reached the blackening desert warmth of Arizona.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

From the top of the roof Dean could see for what felt like miles—all the way to the main road, past that to the rows and rows of pointed blackened roofs that made up the development facing theirs, like a range of neat, symmetrical mountains fading, eventually, into the white sky; the wind was harsh, his fingers bare. The ladder he'd used to climb up was rattling where it rested against the gutter.

 

He was done hanging Christmas lights, but the bitter gale, the solitude up here on the incline of the shingles, was strangely comfortable, and no one would miss him for another fifteen minutes.

 

He was discovering, for the first time, the inward inclinations of human beings in times of cold. His life up until this point had been so restless and so harried that neither he nor anyone he was ever with seemed to adhere to the instinct to stay indoors. For him there had always been new roads, new work, and though he loved a good hot radiator as much as anyone else, it never seemed a necessity, or a tradition. Now, Ben Braeden was less and less out-of-doors, more often holed up in his room playing video games than kicking a soccer ball against the fence; Lisa pulled her morning jog into the study downstairs where the treadmill stood in the corner. Dean went to work in the close, warm hallways of well-to-do families who wanted new wainscoting before the in-laws came for Christmas. The familiar heat and sweat of house sites and exterior renovations was shelved, gone, hidden away while the snow drove in, and he was beginning to feel himself falling prey to a kind of claustrophobia in the rooms below where he sat now, with his hammer in his red-tipped fingers.

 

A little ways down past his feet the newly-hung strands of icicle lights bumped and swung against the gutters in the wind.

 

Christmas was soon. Just one more mile marker on the road that began at the end of Sam.

 

Slowly, carefully, Dean stood up from his crouch, took a few cautious steps down the incline of the roof, until the toes of his boots were nudging the edge of the shingles. Down below, far below, was frost-prickled grass, bleak and grey and dead—the corner of the porch roof—the street, past the shrubs and trees.

 

He wondered, only briefly, what would happen, if he stepped off this roof now. It probably wouldn't kill him. It wouldn't achieve anything; would only add to Lisa's list of worries about him, her list of grievances. He wished so much that he knew, still, how to act, how to make these kinds of decisions, how to think about consequences; but it seemed all he was able to do—as he stepped back from the edge, sat down again, pulling at his red nose with his fingers, looking off at the mountain ranges of the houses—was sit and wait to dream, and try desperately to cull meaning from those dreams.

 

He thought absently for a moment of Hettie Blue Jones, whom he'd almost forgotten until the ghost in his head had mentioned her name. How she'd sat, much in the same attitude as him, in the cold, smoking cigarettes.

 

Whatever became of her and her father? And for that matter, whatever became of Ms Chancey and her beautiful farmhouse, or Liza and her withered veins? Were they as nebulous and abstracted now as they seemed to him—dead, turned to dust, blown away? Sealed up in unmarked graves or chilly mausoleums, weathering the winter with empty skulls? Or if they were alive—against all odds in this ever-darkening world—did they ever stop to spare a backwards glance towards the children they had known once, hosted in their homes, held in their arms?

 

Did any of them remember Sam in the way that he did?

 

Dean touched two fingers to his lips, absently, imagining the roll of a cigarette between them, exhaling to watch his breath freeze and cloud and vanish. He wondered if Hettie Blue Jones was out there somewhere, in a motel, looking at the Bible in her nightstand, knowing her father once had placed it there—if maybe she was paging through it remembering, if only for a moment, the two young boys she'd met in that parking lot in Washington; if maybe she, too, could recall as well as Dean could the glimmer of December light in Sam's eyes; if she understood who and what had called her into their game of catch that day. She'd spoken about Jesus.

 

He thought of holes in the Earth, and outstretched arms.

 

Fitting his boots into the rungs of the ladder, he climbed down from the roof.


	7. VII

_Iberia, Missouri_

_September_ _1991_

 

Sammy watched the hacksaw move back and forth, endlessly, squealing a little bit against the metal of the shotgun's barrel, chin in his hand, content and quiet.

 

The curtains in the room were closed, but sunlight still filtered through, golden and thick; dust motes danced in it. Dad wouldn't be back until much later that night, Dean knew, and he intended to be finished by then.

 

“It's gonna be a surprise,” he'd told Sammy. A surprise for their father, and while Sammy probably thought it was meant as a gift or something like that, Dean knew what this sawed-off shotgun would really mean when his Dad saw it: _I can be a hunter too._

 

Sammy didn't much care for guns. That had become apparent over the last year, as Dad brought weapons into the rooms more and more often, nervous that they'd be found out in the Impala's trunk, nervous, in his increasing paranoia, that his children were in danger there. Sammy didn't know what they were for, what they were used on—not yet; that secret was still safe—but he shied away from them almost instinctively, as if they were poised to go off at any moment, or hurl themselves away from where they lay on tables or against walls to attack him.

 

He knew better, now, than to ask questions of Dean when it came to Dad—Dean was careful to keep up a blank and frustrated face whenever the subject arose, and Sammy wasn't stupid. Sometimes, when he was feeling petulant enough to be annoying, he'd rattle off questions at Dean until Dean wrestled him to the floor or cuffed his head, defaulting to pushing his little brother into anger and sulking rather than facing what he was being asked. He was running out of ways to tell Sammy to be quiet, to stop wondering.

 

Dean dusted off his hands, cracking his knuckles; they were stiff from holding the hacksaw. “You like it?” he said, a little breathless, glancing at his little brother.

 

Sammy shrugged. “I guess,” he said.

 

“Dad's gonna love it,” Dean said, ignoring his lack of enthusiasm, picking up the gun and peering down the shortened barrel. “You think? He's gonna be proud.”

 

“I hate his stupid guns,” Sammy muttered, clambering backwards down from the table, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. He scuffed the carpet with his foot, scowling at it. “Why does he need all those guns? Why do you gotta have one?”

 

“'Cause when I grow up,” Dean said, cocking the gun, holding it level with his eye to peer down the barrel, “I'm gonna be just like Dad.”

 

“I thought Dad fixed cars,” Sammy said, without looking at him, but Dean could hear in his voice, in the careful sound of his words, that this was yet another attempt to get the truth—because these days, Dean knew, Sammy was perfectly aware that he was being lied to.

 

Dean set the gun down, looked at him. Set his jaw. “He does.”

 

Sammy looked at him out of the corner of his eye, swaying a little; his face was getting peevishly flushed in the way it always did when he was quietly angry. “Then why does he need all those guns?”

 

“I keep telling you, Sammy, sometimes he goes on hunting trips to, like, kill deer and stuff.”

 

Sammy clearly wasn't convinced. “Then how come we never go with him?”

 

“Dude—shut up, go watch some TV,” Dean said, louder than he'd intended, shoving the sawed-off across the table with a loud, heavy noise. “You're so—”

 

But he stopped, fists clenched against the table's wood, at a loss. Sammy glared at him for a moment in the accusing way of children and then walked defiantly off, shunting the switch on the motel's TV, sulking down into the armchair across from it, so far down that his legs were extended straight against the floor. Dean sighed, frustrated, and turned back to his shotgun, his precious hard-earned shotgun, looking at the ends of the barrel for things to file off.

 

When Dad came home, much later, after dark, Dean jumped up from the table just in time for Sammy—still slouching in the chair—to say, “Dean made a stupid gun,” snatching the surprise right from Dean's hands, and he faltered, shoulders falling, the shotgun in his grip.

 

Dad hardly even glanced at the shotgun as he made his way inside; there were specks of blood on his forehead. “That's good, son,” he said in passing, and then he went into the bathroom and closed the door.

 

Dean stood there for a moment, stomach twisting with upset, and then he threw the shotgun down and strode across the floor to whack Sammy on the back of the head.

 

“Ow!” Sammy yowled, starting upright, twisting violently to look at him. “What was that for, you jerk?”

 

“I was gonna show him first!” Dean hissed, feeling his face grow hot. “I was gonna show him and you just had to ruin it!”

 

“Who cares?” Sammy bit back. “I don't care about your stupid gun. You won't even tell me what it's for.”

 

“It's for hunting, Sammy, I keep telling you that!”

 

“I hope you kill a lot of deer with your stupid gun,” Sammy said, spiteful, and turned back to the TV, and Dean had to swallow tears, force himself to keep from cuffing his brother round the head again.

 

He wanted, right then, more than anything, to admit the truth, to sit down on the floor opposite Sammy's sulk and spill it all. This was what lying did to him, to his little brother—it made them nasty; it was making Sammy grow up sour and angry, tipping dangerously forward into a world that was already black and awful, and Dean missed the toddler who rarely spoke and never dreamed of anything being other than the way it was.

 

But then Dad came out of the bathroom and Dean felt any and all resolve to tell the truth sealing up and pushing back down into his throat, and when they were ordered to bed they both answered with a moody, melancholy _yes, sir,_ and though Dean was still angry at Sammy he still tucked him in, blankets snug and secure around that thin, wiry body, arms clutching Dog's rat-bitten fabric. This couldn't last much longer.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

“Think we're good?”

 

Ben looked thoughtfully at the shopping cart, piled up in the middle with objects for the check-out, his hands wrapped around the cart's metal edge.

 

He and Dean had been out here all afternoon, moving from store to store looking for Christmas gifts for Lisa; for someone with little to no experience buying actual, expensive presents for people, Dean was finding the excursion almost—comforting. They'd picked up a new set of dishes for the kitchen; he'd found a new bathrobe for her in her favourite shade of purple, had held it up against his palm, imagining her bright smile, her dark hair laid out against it. There was a kind of nervous energy to this, an uncertainty about what would be appreciated or not, but there was a kind of pride in it too—a sense of accomplishment.

 

This was going to be his first Christmas, he knew, in a real house, trappings and traditions and all. This new life was full of so many _firsts._

 

Dean waited patiently for Ben to look over the haul and make sure nothing was missing. They were in an aisle stuffed to bursting with red and gold and green, tinsel and baubles and silver, a new star for the top of the Christmas tree nestled between the running shoes Lisa had been coveting for months and the coffee table book on the history of the Indianapolis Colts that he'd seen her eyeing the last time they'd been out together.

 

It only took a moment for Ben to pipe up.

 

“I gotta get her calendar!” he said, and took off down the aisle, wheeling around the corner, and Dean sighed, without frustration, leaned against the cart to push it after the kid.

 

When he found him, Ben was looking through the racks of pre-packaged, oversized kitchen calendars, tongue between his teeth, searching for the perfect one, and Dean crossed his arms on the railing of the cart, watched.

 

It was going to be strange to see the calendar on the pantry door go. Be replaced. He knew it'd be consigned to the pile of past years in the study, where Lisa could look back through it whenever she liked, but it still made him feel a little uneasy. His arrival date was in that calendar. Putting it away felt like—closing a chapter, opening a new book, when it felt as if nothing had quite reached a conclusion just yet.

 

He'd been with these people for almost eight months. That number felt almost too big, or perhaps not big enough, and it was only going to get bigger, and what did that mean?

 

Ben found a calendar with a taut plastic packaging and put it triumphantly in the cart and then turned, making his way towards the end of the aisle, to the front of the store.

 

Dean swallowed. He pictured two, three, five, ten, a dozen more calendars, blank and arrayed out in front of him, and Terrible May marked out in big red symbols on each one, as if to say, _soon this month is going to be an anniversary, and you're going to live through it, year after year, further and further away from him—_

 

Dean ground the side of his arm down hard against the rough railing of the shopping cart and the grate of pain banished that thought. He walked faster than he should have to catch up with Ben, the wheels gliding across the linoleum. The kid was standing near a checkout, two Twix bars clutched optimistically in his hands. Dean let him have them. It felt like spiting the sadness.

* * *

 

They had all gone out together to get the tree from the Home Depot, and Ben had selected the fattest, tallest Douglas Fir he could find, and watched, rapturous, while the man at the front trimmed it down to size. The man and Dean had strapped it to the top of Lisa's car while she held the bungee cords down by the doors, and all the way home Ben twisted in his seat to see the ends of branches hanging over the street, to make sure the tree didn't fly off on the highway.

 

It was standing in the corner of the living room now, by the window; Dean had had to cut off the top—it had scraped a long brown line across the ceiling when they'd lifted it, a few centimeters too tall for this room. Lisa had put on the station with the least annoying Christmas repertoire and Dean, for the first time in his life, hung tinsel and kitschy knick-knacks from relatives he'd never met, instead of air fresheners and stale popcorn strings, on the branches.

 

When they were done it glimmered and shone like every tree in every Christmas movie Dean had ever seen, and he felt proud—proud that they had done this, that he had helped in making something so beautiful—but even something like this had no effect on the empty hollow feeling in his gut.

 

That was still there. The sadness, the intelligent persistence of memories. It lifted its blackened, long-haired head to the smell of the pine and the glow of the lights on the wall whenever Dean passed the living room by, and he was too weary of it to fight it back down much anymore.

 

When he and Ben got home from the shopping center he sent the kid upstairs, clutching bags and boxes, to hide Lisa's gifts in his closet. He stood a moment, a little lost, in the foyer, listening to the doors opening and closing upstairs, the tree standing darkly in the corner of his eye.

 

Suddenly and desperately he wanted Lisa. He'd been doing so well, keeping his grief closed up, these last few weeks, but Christmas was looming and he knew it was going to be hard to keep that up much longer with the holiday staring him in the face. He wanted her, her touch, whatever mundane things she had to say.

 

She was in the kitchen when he went looking—walked past the calendar on the pantry door— stirring a candy cane into a mug of hot cocoa, watching snow collect out the window. When she heard his footsteps she turned.

 

“Hey,” she said, grinning; her feet made no sound on the tile when she came to him, kissed him gently, smelling of peppermint and cold. “How was shopping?”

 

She had to lift her hands with the mug in them when he put his arms around her, buried his face in her shoulder, and she froze like that, awkwardly, her hot cocoa hovering over his head.

 

“You okay?” she said, muffled, into the side of his head, and he couldn't answer; he just wanted to hold her a little, be held by her. She was warm, solid, and her free hand was resting on the back of his neck, now, and he felt himself sag a little—not relax, but come loose.

 

Lisa twisted a little to set her mug down on the kitchen table and then she hugged him properly, her face against his neck.

 

They stood like that a while, swaying a little on the tile, the grey wet day outside. Before too long Ben came crashing down the stairs again and Dean breathed in hard, broke away from her, held her waist a moment in his hands, looked down at her; she looked up at him, quiet, eyes questioning.

 

He cleared his throat, kissed her mouth before he could say anything about the sadness stirring in his chest. Christmas was in three days. He wasn't going to bring this down for her, not when she'd taken such pains to make it good for _him._

 

God, but he wished he could tell her what he saw in his dreams, in still moments of daylight. But to tell her would be to admit that he'd been dwelling, that he _liked_ dwelling, that grief was easier and more comfortable than hauling himself up bodily from that pit, that sometimes, though he felt like a traitor to his promise, he didn't _want_ to move on, to get better. That the idea of giving up his sadness felt like a betrayal, of Sam, of everything that had been before—that he loved her, but there were moments where he loved his sorrow more.

 

He didn't want to lose her smile, her understanding, her insistence that he heal. Maybe he loved his grief, but he knew it would kill him without someone shouting to him from the top of the abyss. She—standing here in her socks and sweatpants, her hair loose, her hand wrapped around her steaming mug, the sweetest, most normal, most loving person he had left—was all that was keeping him upright, he knew.

 

And he was a guest here; he always had to remember that. He had the safety of this little family only because they were kind enough to give it to him. His mouth to feed, his person to accommodate, was burden enough.

* * *

 

On Christmas Eve they stayed up late, the both of them, trying to peel tape and fold wrapping paper as quietly as possible so as not to wake Ben upstairs. The lights of the Christmas tree were the only glow to work by; between the curtains on the window snow was falling, stark against the black darkness.

 

They didn't speak much, but Lisa hummed while she worked, expertly wrapping Ben's gifts and writing out _From: Santa Claus_ on a few every now and then in looping handwriting that wasn't her own. Ben didn't believe in Santa anymore, but she still did this, she told Dean, every year. It almost made her sad that her child had lost that piece of innocence already. He thought, as he watched her, that maybe she did it to keep hold of the little boy Ben had once been for one more year, one more Christmas.

 

He knew the feeling.

 

Dean had no eye for the aesthetics of the tree, so he let her arrange the gifts around its bottom, propped up or laid out, bows glittering against the tree-skirt. She flicked a pine needle from her finger when she was done and then stood up, stepped backward until she had landed against Dean's chest, and he twined his arms around her middle, resting his lips on the back of her head, looking in near-awe at the postcard-perfect assembly before them—Thomas Kinkade couldn't have painted it better.

 

“Wow,” he said, breathed, against her head; he could almost feel her smiling. “It looks great, Lis.”

 

“No thanks to you,” she murmured, resting her hands on his. “You couldn't gift-wrap to save your life. I hope you know that.”

 

Her laughter felt like butterflies bumping beneath his palms, and he closed his eyes, grateful for it, grateful for the gentle smell of her hair and the glow of the tree and the warmth of the room, grateful that he got to have this, if only while it lasted.

 

“Come on,” she said, turning towards the stairs, looking up at him, her dark eyes almost liquid in the light. “Let's go to bed.”

 

He stopped her at the foot of the stairs to kiss her, fighting down the itch of melancholy on his spine, and for a moment she held his face in her hands.

 

“Merry Christmas, Dean,” she said, softly, against his lips, and pressed her forehead against his, in solidarity, almost.

 

“Yeah,” he whispered. “You too.” He smiled, as much as it was possible for him to smile, and let her lead him upstairs. Away from the golden glimmer of the tree, and the languid black shadow that seemed to be crouching behind it, waiting for run its fingers through his head, to make him remember.

* * *

 

He woke early in the morning, when it was still dark, unsure what had woken him; the curtains were open a little, and snow was still falling fast and thick and utterly silent.

 

Lisa was asleep, her back turned to him. Dean lay there a moment, looking at the blankets tucked up almost to her ears. He'd thrown off his own covers, he realised, looking down at himself, as if in a nightmare, and his bare arms and legs were rough with goosebumps.

 

He sat up, quietly, careful not to make the bed-springs creak.

 

The carpet was cool under his feet, almost damp.

 

He'd woken into one of those bizarre states of complete uncertainty—wasn't sure why he was awake, what he was doing, why he was sitting here—for an instant, as he was blinking sleep away, he thought he saw something flicker in the darkened corner of the room, and lifted his head. There was nothing there.

 

He got up, stood idle for a moment, feeling the cold prickle on his back; then he reached down to pick up his wallet from the nightstand, wandered around the bed to the window, lifted the curtain a little.

 

It rested against his side. The glass was black, the street below obscured by driving snow—he could almost imagine he was staring into nothingness, an endless, blizzarding night, that Lisa's house was the only bastion of existence left, and he was in it. The leather of his wallet in his hand was cool and slick.

 

It only took a moment to open it and find what he was looking for. He kept it behind his dollar bills, always. The only photograph of Sam he had.

 

It was small, only an inch high, and creased and faded almost beyond recognition, but he pulled it out anyway—he could feel the soft, worn spot where he always held it between his fingers. Even if this picture were smudged and destroyed he'd still know exactly what it looked like. He was certain of that.

 

He held it up against the cold glass for the modicum of light the street-lamps offered, the better to see it. His hands were shaking, just a little bit.

 

He hadn't looked at this picture since—since before Sam died, really, if he was remembering correctly; it had been too hard to stomach in the months since he'd been gone. It wasn't even the best picture—it was his high school sophomore yearbook photo, Sam in that strange between-state of young teenagers, not yet quite the sharp, dark, fox-like thing he'd grown into, not quite the soft, crooked-smiled child he'd been anymore.

 

It was the most generic of pictures, just a straight-on smile, creases at his eyes. His brother collapsed down into dull colours, flat shades. No nuance to the nut-brown of his skin that Dean remembered from those days. No real testament to the freakishly changeable earth of his eyes. A single camera flash couldn't possibly convey the way they'd shifted under different lights, how they could be imbued with fire or Spanish moss or summer grass whenever they pleased. Often it had been subtle, but Dean remembered. He'd been in awe of that, once.

 

He leaned against the window, shoulder pressed to the chilly glass, looking at the shadows creeping into the folds in the photo. As if they were going to overwhelm it, eat it up, take the last image of his brother's face out of the world.

 

He stuffed it back into his wallet with something almost like paranoia, and sank into himself against the window, too awake to go back to sleep, too listless to move. The snow outside went on and on. It seemed as if morning might never come and the dark would stretch out forever, and the snow would rise and pile higher and higher until it consumed the house and then there would be nothing left.

 

Dean heard blankets shifting and knew Lisa was awake, but if she saw him standing there, she said nothing. He could feel her eyes on the back of his head like two fingerprints, watching, trying sleepily to understand what he was doing up, doing over there.

 

He didn't move. His eyes unfocused past the snow until it was one long blur of white against black, waiting, though it was hours away, for the first grey push of the sun.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Broken Bow, Nebraska_

_Christmas Eve, 1991_

 

It was the sound of the curtains pulling back, rings against rods, that jarred Dean from what little sleep he was wrapped in, the gentle sound of metal on metal. He turned over in the hard twin bed, blinking.

 

Sammy was at the window, his little silhouette as familiar to Dean as anything else in the world, his hand fisted in one curtain, his head tilted to peer out into the early morning dark. It wasn't yet dawn, he knew, but it was close; and after Christmas morning they'd probably be gone from here, loaded into the Impala like so many little weapons and driven away to some new place just as poor and dirty.

 

Dean shifted upright—didn't say anything; just watched.

 

Sammy probably thought he was being professionally quiet, out of bed like this. He pulled the curtains closed again slowly, carefully, but not before he reached up and tested the lock with his fingers, tugging against it to be sure it was holding steady. Against the golden neon light of the motel sign Dean could see his breath frosting on the cold glass for just a moment before the shoddy curtain shut out the light again.

 

Sammy tiptoed to the door, then, and stood and looked at the doorknob as if contemplating what to do with it. He touched it, then, gripped and twisted it with utmost caution so that it wouldn't grind in the jamb; then he stood on his very tiptoes, reaching up for the latch at the top of the door in a way that Dean knew would make his muscles burn. He couldn't reach it; he was still too scrawny and small for that; but he bounced back down on his heels and gave it a good long stare, as if making certain it was closed, the metal loop flat against the chipped paint of the door. He touched the deadbolt, too, took hold of it between his fingers and then swung it home.

 

The lock _thunked_ into place and he stepped back on the flat carpet in his socks, looking satisfied. Touched a hand to his mouth, fidgeted in place, unaware that he was being watched from the bed, too caught up in his own private fears, worries, whatever they were.

 

Dean lay there, breathing evenly, looking at him. His Christmas gift was lying heavy on his chest. The big gold pendant on its black string, making folds in his shirt, unfamiliar enough to be exciting, though he'd owned it for hours now. Sammy's heel was pushed squarely into the discarded newspaper on the floor that had wrapped the necklace in the first place.

 

And here was something he had never seen before, Dean realised, sleepily, looking at his little brother standing there like that, examining the door with slow eyes moving from latch to lock to knob and back again—in the shadows by the unlit Christmas tree, floor littered with chip bags and wrapping paper and fake pine needles and Dean's own muddy bootprints, in a shirt too big for his skinny chest and pyjama pants that hung loose on his hips, socks that hadn't been cleaned in two states—he'd seen Sammy scared before, but not like this. The shock after the shtriga, that had been fear; his baby-crying after nightmares, or on the street after the fire, that had been fear. But this was new. It was tensed all up his body, as if someone had put pins into his elbows and knees and neck, keeping him fixed on that door.

 

Dean knew what he was doing out of bed so late. He was doing what Dean had done at his age and before. Making sure the monsters couldn't get in, now that he knew that they were out there somewhere in the cold black wilds beyond the door.

 

When Sammy finally turned away—reluctantly, as if he were wrenching himself from something—Dean shut his eyes quickly, relaxed, guilty for having intruded on something like that, and for a million other reasons besides.

 

A moment later he felt the mattress sink beside him and the covers lift, let in chill and fall, and then Sammy's bony body was curled up right next to his, his face pressing the new necklace into Dean's chest, the hard pointed horns of the golden face poking into his sternum, and Sammy's cold hand, knuckles bent, on his arm.

 

Dean opened his eyes again only when he was sure Sammy had fallen asleep again. There wasn't much light to see by—only the faded glow of the motel sign filtered through the curtains—but he could see the tight places on his little brother's face where he'd been crying, even after the fiasco with the stolen presents, even after the night was over and the truth Dean had told him had settled. His dark hair splayed back from his open face, and all at once Dean felt _sick—_ nauseated, that he'd sat there, looked into his innocent brother and spilled the beans, brought the hatchet down on all his dreams and thoughts and hopes. It was Christmas, and in one fell movement he'd darkened Sammy's world by twenty shades. _He'd_ done that. Ruined so much.

 

It would be a relief, not having to lie so much; there was that. But tomorrow morning, in the cheerless snow, under the dark end of December, Sammy wouldn't be the same person he'd been the day before, and he'd never be that person again. Never small and ignorant and bright-smiled, not ever again.

 

He remembered Mrs Chancey's living room, what seemed forever ago—remembered whispering that the hands laid against his skin right now in this bed would never, ever hold a rifle in them, would never pull a trigger, not if he could help it; and now that promise was crumpled on the floor among the mud and the newspaper, and he knew now that he was naïve to ever say that. Of course he couldn't help it. The world was big and cold and black and hungry, twisted up with metal and dark roads and smoke, and it ate up little boys like nothing, and whether he liked it or not they were both in its jaws now, speared on its needle teeth, and all he could do—all either of them could do, now—was latch the door, and pray to be spared.

 

The tighter he gathered Sammy up against him in their bundle of blankets and cold feet, the harder the necklace pushed against his chest, as if it would pierce him straight through. He gathered him tighter anyway.


	8. VIII

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

It was snowing when he went downstairs, and for a moment he paused at the bottom of the steps, looking down the narrow hall into the kitchen where Lisa, in her early-morning workout clothes, was standing at the coffee maker, one foot poised backwards, the slope of her back against the white window like a magazine cutout.

 

The New Year was in two days; the Christmas tree still stood in the front room, though it felt stale and strange there, now, stripped of all its meaning.

 

Dean went in to her, in to the kitchen, quiet. The calendar didn't rise and fall anymore when he passed. Its one remaining page hung flat against the pantry door, almost marked through to its end.

 

“Morning.”

 

Lisa hummed, but didn't look at him. Her fingers were toying round the edge of her coffee mug. Hesitant, Dean put his arms around her waist, rested his head against hers—she didn't react but to lean back into him a little, easy, and with his cheek against her hair he looked at the last green page of the calendar—laid there as unsupposing as could be.

 

In a few days it would be gone, replaced with the new one. And then it would be a whole new year—a whole new piece of time to push into, a future. Dean didn't know what he thought about that, yet, besides the inkling that it scared him, that he was leaving this year behind, and everything that had been in it, too.

 

The coffee maker beeped and Lisa pulled away a little, to pour her mug, and Dean let her go—drifted listlessly to the window, looked out at the snow coming down in its droves, obscuring the houses across the way.

 

Behind him a cupboard opened, ceramic _clink_ ed. Lisa said, “You want some coffee?”

 

“I shouldn't,” he said. The bushes, the lawn looked like a feather bed, acres of pillows and soft cold and sleep. “I'm gonna be late for work.”

 

One of the kitchen chairs ground out against the floor.

 

“Come sit down a minute,” Lisa said, and he turned to her. She was sitting there, one leg crossed over the other, looking calmly past the rim of her mug where it touched her lips, and there was no saying _no_ to that.

 

He lingered there a moment, at the counter, one fist curled against the sink, the whole dead world at his back. She'd put a mug at his place diagonal to her, steaming softly up in translucent curls.

 

She waited, didn't say anything, until he gave in, and settled into the seat across the table, fingertips barely touching the prickle-hot sides of the mug. He was sagging; he could feel it. He knew what was coming, too.

 

“I saw you up,” she said, finally, setting her mug down on the red place-mat in front of her. It curled at the edges, Dean saw, from where it had been washed one too many times. “On Christmas Eve.” There was nothing accusatory in her tone—only weary. “I saw you, um—get up, and go stand at the window—and you stood there for hours. Or it felt like hours. It was a long time. I watched you, I didn't say anything. I didn't think.” She took a sip of her coffee, her jaw tight. “I didn't think it would be right to disturb you.”

 

“Lis—”

 

“No more,” she said, “of this vague, stupid _I'm just having a bad time_ bullshit. Please.” She looked at him, and he couldn't hold her gaze—it was too hard, too knowing, to be held. “Something's not right. Hasn't been right for a while now with you. And I've told you, I can only handle this stuff up to a point—”

 

“I know.”

 

“—and the one thing you haven't done, Dean,” she said, keeping her hands fixedly around her mug, as if she was afraid that touching him would break her resolve, “is talk.”

 

There were thin black bubbles skating around the top of his coffee. He followed them with his eyes.

 

“So can you—can I ask you—can you talk to me?” She cleared her throat. “Can you tell me something, anything, about what's going on with you, so we can—fix it, or try? Because Christmas—Dean, Christmas was—”

 

She smiled, then, and he didn't expect it, only saw it from the corner of his eye like the snow coming down.

 

“Christmas was _great,_ ” Lisa said. “Ben and I haven't had a Christmas like that—you know, properly, with a tree, and gifts, with a whole house, we haven't had anything like that in—longer than you know, Dean, and that was because of _you,_ and it was good, and I thought—maybe you were even a little happy. And I want that to be every day for us, I want—”

 

She took a breath. Dean thought absently for a minute that she carried winter about her like a warm coat and she was right, wasn't she, that for a moment there, every now and then, he had been happy. In front of that tree with her he'd been happy. Scared, and sad, and nervous, but happy.

 

“I want you to get better so that we can _be_ that family,” she said, “if you'll—if you'll have us.”

 

He didn't say anything; couldn't. Just looked into his coffee. Either it was too early for words or he simply didn't have any.

 

“So—details or no details, will you tell me? Will you give me a sense of what's going on?”

 

“Lisa—”

 

But how to start? How to get past the lump that had taken up permanent residence in his throat?

 

“I want to, but I just—I don't know how the hell to say any of it.”

 

He knew it would be a world off his shoulders if he only spilled it out on the table in front of her like loose coffee beans in the December sunlight but where was the beginning? In the doorway the day the Millers' baby came home, or was it further back, in his little labeled square on the calendar, or Terrible May itself, was it in the graveyard, or the convent or in Hell, in Cold Oak or California streets, or way, way back, on a half-birthday, packaged neatly in the smell of sulphur and the screams of his mother and the awful weight of the baby in his arms? There was too much to _say._ Too much had _been._

 

He swallowed hard—his throat felt slick, sick—pushed his coffee away. It was going sour on his tongue.

 

“I've been—”

 

Remembering, hallucinating, thinking, thinking, thinking, about _my brother, about my brother and me._

 

“I've been having these—I don't know what you'd call them—these dreams, maybe.” Dean looked down at his hand, curled loosely on the wood. Rolled his knuckle down as if he could gouge into it with his bone. “Or memories, or something, about when we were kids, and I can't stop—I can't stop thinking about him.”

 

 _Him._ His voice broke there like cheap plastic. He felt it like a shiver down his spine, as if that were splitting too.

 

“About Sam,” Lisa said. His name crawled out of her mouth like a crippled pale white thing and he could almost see it—dropping to the table off her lips, weak and feeble and half-dead. He pulled his eyes away from her.

 

“Yeah. And I don't—I don't know what to do about them.” he said, something uncoiling and loosening and breathing in his chest. “I like them, Lis.”

 

He swallowed again, still harder. His tongue felt like cotton, soft cold cotton.

 

“And I don't know what's worse, you know—feeling all this, or not feeling any of it. Forgetting.”

 

Dean fell silent, then. There was nothing else to say.

 

Lisa didn't say anything, either. He was grateful for that—grateful for the way she reached up to touch his cheek for just an instant and no longer, grateful that she sat there with him for ten, fifteen minutes, until they were both late for work and the snow was glaring bright in the window, until their coffee was cold dregs. Grateful that he could almost feel her thinking, calm and collected and determined that something could be done, though she said nothing of it. When she got up, finally, and kissed the top of his head, and went upstairs to shower, he felt both weightless and heavy as Hell, and he watched the snow out the window for a long, long time, until it blended with the bleak white sky and there was nothing out there anymore—nothing at all. Just this oasis of light and the crippled pale thing on the table that sat and watched and was with him.

 

* * *

 

He went to the library again. There were two floors of books in this place, any number of topics that might distract him, but Dean found himself in that one aisle a second time. _O – Occult P – Paranormal R – Religion._

 

A few books looked new, but though he took each one out and flipped through them nothing stuck out. As if—it was laughable—as if anything in a public library would be enough to change what had happened eight months ago.

 

 _Eight_ _months._ It seemed like eight years, or only yesterday, or both at once.

 

 _The Diabolical Bestiary_ was a parody of truth and had nothing in its index about the Cage in the Pit. _Raising the Dead: A History_ was more interested in the trend of zombie movies in the last five years than in the art itself. For a while, _Inferno: Hell, the Devil, and Sin_ looked almost promising—he sat on the floor between the metal shelves, boots propped up against the row labeled _W – Wisdom,_ running a finger down the table of contents, saw the name _Michael_ and perused the chapter for any hint of what he knew to be reality—but it cited nothing except the cleanest, most innocuous of holy texts—simple information, a fable, nothing more.

 

The dead fly was still stuck, he saw, in the fluorescent light above his head. He sat there, the occasional bibliophile passing in his peripheral vision, looking at it. _Inferno_ dangled between his fingers.

 

He needed to _do_ something. Get his blood flowing, or take some kind of action. That was what Lisa wanted, and he knew she was right to want it, and to try and push her rationale into his skull. But what he'd told her this morning wasn't enough, and there was no one else to talk to—no shrink that could ever understand, and like Hell was he doling out on her health insurance to talk to some Freud-worshiping asshole in a suit. Like Hell was he telling anyone like that about Sam.

 

He could see a window, vaguely, at the far far end of the aisle. It was breathlessly cold outside, though the snow had stopped falling; now it was all blankness. Endless white sky.

 

But maybe—

 

Dean pulled his coat tight across his chest as he got up, shoved _Inferno_ back carelessly into the first empty space on the shelf he saw. The woman at the front desk lifted her head to wish him a good afternoon as he left, angling through the alarm barriers by the door.

 

There was no one idling on the steps of the library, but he went round the corner anyway, where the snow was piled up against the outer wall and the only sound was cars on the road a ways off, and the occasional faint noise of the doors opening and closing. He crossed his arms to keep his own warmth in, looked up into that cold eternal expanse of cloud, watched his breath rising up to vanish into it.

 

“Cas?” He ducked his head around the corner to make sure no one was eavesdropping, then pulled back. “You got your ears on up there?”

 

He remembered what the angel had said about civil war. Hoped he wasn't yanking him off the battlefield, but hoped he _was,_ a little, too. The idea of Cas fighting his family was an idea too close to the raw nerves of his own regret. That wasn't something he'd wish on anyone.

 

“I know you're busy, man, but if you've got a second—I just need to talk to somebody. I need to talk to you.”

 

He shivered, drew himself tighter against the chill stone of the library.

 

“I'm outside Hamilton County Public—”

 

A cascade of wings. “Hello, Dean.”

 

Cas appeared in the snow beside him as if he'd been there all along, and if Dean was startled, well, it was only because it had been so long—months, since he'd seen his best friend last. He took him in for an instant—the same ratty coat, the same ill-fitting suit and backwards tie—but something new, dark, cloven out of his face; there was blood on his white shirt cuff, and blood on his temple, though Dean wasn't sure if it was his or not, or if angels bled like that at all.

 

“Shit,” he said, and Cas blinked at him. “Am I interrupting something?”

 

“I was helping to put down an insurrection,” Cas said, calmly, as if it was something he did every day. “I'm fine.” He tilted his head—looked Dean over the way Dean had looked over him—frowned. “But you're not.”

 

Dean didn't know what to do besides agree. He shrugged his shoulders, hunching; the frost was biting his fingers.

 

“D'you wanna, um—there's gotta be a coffeeshop or something around here, somewhere warm,” he said, eyeing the parking lot and the far-off street warily, acutely aware of how under-dressed for the weather Castiel looked out here, lurking behind the library. “I mean—”

 

Cas nodded, still looking at him with that skin-piercing gaze of his, and followed silently when Dean ducked back into the sunlight and back down the steps to the truck.

* * *

 

Dean ordered a black coffee for Cas and nothing for himself, and found the quietest booth in the corner of the shop to sit in. It was hardly an afternoon rush; the barista behind the counter was busy fixing something, ears plugged up with headphones, and save for one sleepy-looking old woman by the front window, they were alone.

 

Cas sat across from him, swirling his coffee with a triad of black stirrers, not bothering to drink it.

 

“You said you needed to talk to me,” he said, keeping his voice appropriately low.

 

“I didn't mean to pull you away from anything important—”

 

“I told you before, Dean,” he said, firmly, with gravity. “You take precedence over war. Especially—as you are.”

 

Dean looked up at him, trying to feel amused, or insulted, and failing. “What's that supposed to mean?”

 

Cas didn't answer that—just sat there, waiting patiently for Dean to speak, to get to the point.

 

Before, with Lisa, it had felt like an event, trying to find the right words for what was happening, but now—for some reason, watching Cas make little whirlpools out of his steaming coffee, idle but alert, now, he thought, he could do it. Lisa loved him, but Cas loved and _knew,_ and there was so much less to explain this way.

 

His breath shuddered when he drew it. He fought it down.

 

“I thought I was doing better,” he said, quiet, more to the table between Castiel's elbows than to Castiel's face. “I mean, there have been months—around September, you know, I started thinking maybe I was moving in the right direction, finally.”

 

Cas' fingers dropped the coffee stirrers; they rested against the rim of his cup and he folded his hands around the cardboard holder, didn't say anything.

 

“But we have these neighbours, you know—across the street, the Millers.” It was like snow melting from tree branches now—that was what it felt like; like drops of water dangling from dead leaves and finally falling to Earth. “They just had a new baby. Brought it home in October. And I—”

 

Dean cleared his throat, scrubbed at his eyes, closed them.

 

“We saw them coming home,” he said, “and I had this—this passing _thing—_ I was just standing in the door, looking at their house, and thinking about that baby, and I _remembered—_ ”

 

Warm sun, road, and nickel-eyes.

 

“I remembered the day we brought—the day we brought Sam home. But it wasn't like—I mean, I _felt_ it, you know?” He looked up at Cas, straight into those thoughtful quiet eyes, the steam drifting over them. “Like I was _there_ again, like I was four, and I swear to God, Cas, I smelled the leather in the car—”

 

He had to stop a moment, choke down the hot thing that was rising in his throat.

 

“And I just keep— _remembering._ ” There was no other way to put it. “It keeps happening. All these images of him and me, and we're kids, all these pieces of us—him—growing up. And I told Lisa, but I didn't tell her how bad it is. It's almost constant, I mean, everything triggers it, when I'm not awake I'm dreaming about it, and it's been months now, and I can't stop it. I don't want to stop it. And I don't know if that makes me—weak, or broken, or stupid, but it's—it's Sam, Cas,” he said, feeling the undersides of his eyes begin to sting. “It's Sam, in all of this stuff, and it's all that's left, and I don't want to stop it.”

 

He pinched the bridge of his nose, hard, squinted tight.

 

“It might kill me, you know. But I don't want to stop it.”

 

Cas didn't say anything for a long time; he just sat there in his coat, looking at him, with a pull of sympathy against the corners of his mouth. Like he could see right past Dean's skin to the parts of him that were bleeding, twitching, exposed, and who knew? Maybe he could.

 

“And worse,” Dean said, finally, quieter than before, “I mean, I can't dig too much, where I'm at—but I've been looking. For a way to get him back.”

 

“That would be unwise,” Cas said gently, and Dean couldn't do anything but nod.

 

He was right, and there was a reason Sam had forbidden him from doing that kind of digging, had made him swear to normalcy like that in the first place.

 

“But that's all I can do,” Dean said, looking up at him again. “Otherwise I just work and sleep and have these memories, and—if I don't look, if I don't even try, what kind of brother am I? Huh? What kind of brother am I then?”

 

“One who keeps his promises,” Cas said.

 

Dean pushed his hands against his head, bowed it down a little. The back of his neck was aching.

 

“I don't have answers for you,” the angel said, then, pushing his coffee aside, laying his hands flat on the table. “I'm sorry. I wish I knew how to take away your pain. I know how—how massive it is.”

 

Dean laughed at that, mirthlessly, shook his head.

 

“No offense,” he said, cracked, “but you don't know. You don't know anything about it.”

 

“I know what he was to you,” Cas said slowly, carefully, “and I know it wasn't just _family_. It was deeper. And that only makes it worse.”

 

Dean felt his heart drop a beat, lifted his head cautiously, found Castiel's eyes.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Cas didn't respond, but his face made it plain.

 

“You—you knew? About—”

 

“It wasn't hard to figure out,” the angel said gently.

 

Dean sat back in his chair, a little aghast. “And you—what?” He had to laugh, more out of incredulity than anything else this time. “You got nothing to say about that?” He leaned forward, though the barista and the sleepy old woman were well out of earshot. “You're cool knowing I slept with my brother?”

 

“It's not my place to judge who and how you choose to love,” Cas said. “And I know you loved him more than anything else in this world.”

 

Any amusement Dean may have grasped for that split second fell away again, and he sat there, listless, heavy.

 

“ _Loved,”_ he said, after a while. Smiled. A pull of the lips with no meaning to it. He looked down at the table between them. “You know, you say that like he's gone forever.”

 

“I'm sorry,” Castiel said. “I'm sorry.”

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Jerusalem, Arkansas_

_April 1992_

 

Of all the things that had changed since Christmas, at least one thing was constant. Sam still hated the guns.

 

Knowing what they were for, finally, didn't seem to help alleviate his disgust; if anything, knowing only made it worse. He almost always got up and left whenever Dad or Dean brought them in to clean on the motel table, went outside to wander the blank, empty streets for hours, more comfortable in the whistling wind among the dilapidated houses than inside, near the smells of gunpowder and oil. Sometimes Dean had to venture out after him, track him down blocks and blocks away from the shit place they were staying this month, drag him back by the scruff of his hoodie while the sun set and the cold stars pushed out.

 

He was resolved not to learn to shoot. That was another trouble. He was only eight—going on nine—but his stubbornness had shot up like a beanstalk, and didn't seem to be going anywhere. When he wasn't asking avalanches of questions about the things in the dark outside he was sulking about them, holding _goodbyes_ inside his teeth whenever Dad left on a job, covering his face with library books whenever Dean brought out his sawed-off to field-strip and clean.

 

In March, Dean had asked if he wanted to learn how to pull the trigger—his heart in his throat the whole time, remembering that stupid shattered promise he'd made on Ms Chancey's living room floor—but Sam had only glared at him, bitten out a “no,” and returned to _Old Yeller_ or whatever it was the schmucks at the miniscule elementary school were having him read these days. More often than not his default position, in afternoons and evenings, was curled up on the bed with his face in a book, defying as best an eight-year-old could the terrible awful weight of what he knew now, bending over him.

 

Dean, for his part, left his homework mostly folded up inside the ratty old backpack he'd had since fifth grade, favoured the whipping spring winds outside, rattling through the blackened, shrunken trees that stood like sentinels in this part of the state—charcoal-coloured, warped, witchy things, sticking up like broken fingers from the Earth. None of them grew leaves, but every grey, sagging house around here seemed to have at least one near their curb, and they were perfect for climbing, for sitting in to watch the clouds skid soundlessly overhead, for shooting into with the pearl-handled pistol Dad had given him for his thirteenth birthday. Bullets couldn't hurt dead trees. A week after they arrived here he wandered out past the furthest houses and riddled the last stop sign he saw with holes—flat metal clanging against its own post. Shot to shit.

 

Sam had no interest in putting bullets into things—not into stop signs or trees and certainly not into anything with bone and meat. Every time Dean latched the door at night, sliding the chain, testing the rusted knob, he thought about turning around and being definitive, saying something like, “Tomorrow I'm gonna teach you how to shoot;” but he never did; the sight of Sam either engrossed safely in the never-ending pages of Narnia or the flat buzz of the TV always made him falter.

 

Sam needed to be safe. But he also—foolhardy as Dean knew it was—needed to be a kid, for as long he could.

 

It was Dad, eventually, who made the decision for him. Came back to check in on them before he headed out again, chasing some haint out across the windy flats, and laid out one bolt-action and Dean's pistol on the table, looking pointedly at his eldest son.

 

“Tomorrow. Go out to Cedar Creek Cemetery. You know where that is?”

 

Dean nodded.

 

“Take these. Find a quiet spot and show your brother the ropes.”

 

It was ludicrous, sending a thirteen-year-old trekking more than a mile with an eight-year-old who didn't want to go, just to put a gun in the hand of a kid who wanted nothing to do with them. He could feel Sam's annoyance, his anger, from across the room, though his face was obscured by his hands clutching the cover of a book, but Dad had made up his mind, and there was no arguing with it.

 

“Yes, sir,” he said.

 

Dad made a half-hearted attempt to ruffle his hair and vanished, back into the darkness; Dean watched the headlights of the car pull away and turn and disappear.

* * *

 

The cemetery was a long way away, so they set out in the early morning, after Dean shook Sam awake and dunked his head under the bathwater and poured the last of their Froot Loops into a bowl for him. While his brother sulked around and took his sweet time putting on his socks Dean stood at the window, hip against the siding, looking out at the bleakness. Dead grass, dead trees, dead sky, hardly any sun to speak of, too warm for rain, too humid for comfort. Nothing ever breathed or moved in this place. It wasn't even a town; the only other people he'd seen in the last month, besides the people at the school, were the woman who ran the front desk (and had no teeth), and a blank-faced old man with a blind dog who sat out on his porch down the block sometimes. Jerusalem felt like a place you could get lost in, and not in a good way.

 

He swiveled his head; Sam was still tying his shoelaces with all the caution of someone defusing a bomb.

 

“Get your ass in gear, slow-poke,” he said, and Sam thrust a glare up at him, but listened.

 

“I don't wanna go.”

 

“Dad said you had to. So we're going.”

 

“Cemetery's like twenty miles away.”

 

“More like two.” Dean looked back out the window, at the black road that stretched off and away. “We don't have to stay out all day. Let's just get it over with.”

 

Sam was quiet for a while, searching under the bed for his other shoe.

 

Eventually, he said, “Dean?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Are we—is there something coming to get us?”

 

Dean turned again at that, looking down at his little brother half-obscured by the corner of the bed. “What?”

 

“Like—like a monster,” Sam said, finally finding his lost shoe and pulling it out. He kept his face turned carefully down while he put it on. “Is that why I have to learn?”

 

For once, Dean didn't know what to say. He couldn't say _yes—_ as far as he knew they were safe here, behind their latches, behind the salt on the windowsill, and nothing with teeth wanted to bite into them just then—but he couldn't say _no;_ couldn't rightfully understand the nighttime that would push into their window later and say with any certainty that it was empty. Couldn't say _there might always be something coming to get us, but we won't know it 'til it comes._ Couldn't quite bring himself to do that—not to Sam, not right now.

 

“You just gotta learn,” he said, finally, swallowing hard. “Come on, tie your shoe and let's go.”

 

Sam fidgeted and made a noise of frustration and Dean sighed, came round from the window. His laces were all muddled up, tangled and limp, and he was fighting unsuccessfully to get the rabbit through the hole.

 

“Here,” Dean said, dropping down on the hard carpet in front of him. He didn't say anything about Sam being eight and still unable to remember how to tie his shoes right; didn't say anything about the flush on his brother's face. Just reached down and untangled the mess and tied them up right, and then gripped Sam's forearm to haul him to his feet.

 

He put the guns carefully into the duffel Dad had left, slung it over his shoulder, and Sam followed him—still irritated, but obeisant—out into the harsh spring light. The door of the room clicked shut and locked behind them.

* * *

 

Past the cemetery there was only open ranch-land—barbed wire stretching for miles, copses of corpse-like trees, and the drifting highway at their backs. Sam sat under a tree for a while, out of breath from the hike, and Dean idled near a fence-post until he was good to go, scuffing the dirt with the heels of his boots.

 

They ducked under one of those tricky fences and slogged through the tall silvery grass to an island of trees; inside it was cool and dark and hidden, no houses in sight, no one to hear the shots but them and the clouds and the cows, maybe, somewhere far away.

 

Sam frowned at the rifle when Dean put it into his hands, but he didn't throw it down or refuse it. He let Dean push his arms into position, change and re-change the angle of his elbows, correct his aim, and didn't say anything. He was gripping it as if he knew he had to but his face was—almost sad; almost betrayed.

 

Dean tried not to dwell on it.

 

When all was said and done, Sam hit the nearest tree two times out of five, and recoiled violently with the gun when it went off. His knees were shaking a little when he gave it back to Dean, but Dean pretended not to notice. He was heart-sick, and looking at Sam too long only made it worse—all he could think about was that thing he'd said, all those years ago. _You're never gonna shoot a gun. It's fun, but I won't let you._

 

“Here,” he said, trying not to let his voice crack. Sam looked up at him while he angled the gun at the tree. “You gotta—you see? And keep it steady—”

 

Three loud pops and bark spun off the tree every time. The gun clicked and buzzed against his hands when he pushed it back into Sam's, watched—past the itch in his eyes—while his little brother raised it, corrected his own stance, aimed at the tree and fired again.

 

Five shots. This time three hit home.

 

_You'll never have to shoot a gun, 'cause I'll protect you._

 

Dean cleared his throat, turned back to the duffel bag on the ground to find his pistol. He hoped Sam couldn't see the wet gleam in his eyes in what little sunlight there was.

 

While his back was turned Sam fired off two more shots and hissed a little “ _yes_ ,” so quiet that Dean almost couldn't hear. He crouched there, hand in the bag.

 

“Here,” he said, finally rising, scuffing his wrist along his nose. He held the pistol out for Sam to take, gently, into his hands. Dean sniffed, cleared his throat, slung his shoulders back. “Try this out.”

 

He stood behind Sam while he aimed the pearl-handled pistol at the tree, his skinny elbow shaking but his wrist steady, and he watched while his little brother pounded those rounds into the tree—a full six, and every one hit their mark.

 

“Good,” he said, but his face was burning, and he felt lower than he'd ever felt in his life, standing there. This kid, this little kid he'd tried so very, very hard to protect from all this, opening up holes in dead tree trunks like this.

 

Every time the trigger snapped back under Sam's finger felt like a crack in all the goodness and the innocence and the childishness Dean had hoped—foolishly—could last in him.

 

Eight years old. Shot to shit.

* * *

 

_Allagash, Maine_

_October 1992_

 

“Up and at 'em, Sammy.”

 

Dean swatted the massive huddle of blankets on the opposite bed as he went by, yawning, into the bathroom.

 

It was six AM, and still dark outside, and Dean thought for what must have been the millionth time how cruel it was that Dad made them trek the two miles to school in the autumn chill every morning, even though he was gone. They'd been here a week and a half and it was only getting colder every day, and they both needed new coats if they were going to weather the winter up here in the northeast this year—Dean's had holes in its pockets and the zipper was busted, and Sam's only had one button left.

 

There was only stillness from the room. Dean smacked the side of the bathroom door a few times to rouse his brother.

 

He turned the taps in the sink, waited for the water to get warm. Frowned down into it. He'd considered just staying home with Sam more than once since Dad had gone up near the border—probably would have already done it, were it not for his fear that Dad (who knew everything) would find out. That was something he didn't want.

 

“Sammy, I'm serious, get up.”

 

He splashed water on his face from his hands, rubbed it dry with one of the dingy, stringy towels on the rack. Still no movement from the room.

 

“You sick or something?” Dean said, leaning out of the bathroom. Sam's pile of blankets hadn't budged. “We gotta go to school.”

 

Still nothing; he felt a little twinge—maybe Sam _was_ sick, and that was why he wasn't moving. He threw the towel on the floor and went back in, grasped the part of the blanket-lump that was most likely his brother's shoulder and shook.

 

The pile of blankets shifted and collapsed under his hand. The bed was empty.

 

Dean stood there for a minute, his heartbeat slowing down, his brain clicking over. “Sammy?” he said, loudly, listening for any sound inside the room, but it was dead silent save for the hum of the motel's generator outside and around the corner.

 

By all appearances, Sam was gone.

 

“Shit,” Dean hissed.

 

He dropped to his knees, peered under the bed in case Sam was playing some kind of stupid trick on him—but there was only bare flooring and dust bunnies; the same went for his own bed; the closet with the sliding doors was empty, the bathtub too, and when he stuck his head out the door there was no one on the dimly-lit sidewalk beneath the portico. Just the black shapes of cars in the blooming blue morning light, and the last of the street-lamps shedding their sodium-yellow onto the street, and no Sam.

 

He called his name out, once, just in case—it echoed in the empty dawn, but he didn't care—there was no response.

 

Dean stumbled back into the room, swearing under his breath with as many words as he had that he'd picked up from Dad, and shoved his feet into his boots without bothering to tie them. He threw on his coat, and saw that Sam's was no longer underneath it, where it had been the night before—that, at least, was a relief. So he'd wandered off on his own—he hadn't been taken.

 

Dean stopped in the doorway long enough to shove his pearl-handled pistol into his pocket. It bulged suspiciously, but he didn't care. His heart was pounding in his throat and all he could think was that this was just like Fort Douglas all over again, shtriga all over again, Sam in danger or lost or hurt or scared and it was his fault for not having been awake, for not having heard the latch or noticed the scattered salt on the threshold until it was too late—this time, if there was something to shoot, he wasn't going to hesitate.

 

Out in the parking lot his resolve faltered—the main street ran parallel to the motel and it went on and on for ages, and he had no idea which way Sam might have gone, what he was looking for, where he was headed, and he slumped against the room door for a moment, trying not to panic. It was blisteringly chill out here and he had no gloves and his gun was heavy in his pocket.

 

 _Shit._ If Dad happened to come home today, if Dean didn't have Sam with him when that happened, he knew Dad wouldn't have a second thought about smacking him around—it was scarier each time and worse, worse, if Dean didn't find Sam, there were a million million things that could hurt or steal or kill him out here in the near-wilderness, monsters and humans alike, and Sam had no gun and no resolve to use one anyway, and he was only nine, and still scrawny as anything—

 

What was he supposed to do? He was thirteen and he had no car and no ideas and if he went to the man at the front desk for help no doubt police or CPS would get involved with the two kids living alone in Room 15 and he couldn't have that—Dad had always told him never to get in touch with the police unless it was absolutely imperative—it was six-thirty AM, his fingers were cold, and he was all alone.

 

Slowly Dean went back into the room, shut the door, slid down and sat against it, tried to think.

 

He'd woken up a little after four for just a minute, but he remembered seeing Sam's hand out from under the covers then, so he couldn't have been gone for more than two hours. Where would a little kid go before the sun was up in a cold place like this?

 

_Think, think._

 

Why would he leave now? Everything had been fine, Dean thought, in the last few days—Sam seemed to like this town well enough, though he complained of the walk to school—Dad had been gone practically since they'd arrived, but that was commonplace—the kid was always down in the dumps to some degree these days, but not any more than usual, as far as Dean could tell, not lately.

 

What had they done the night before? He remembered they'd found a TV movie and let it run, turned out all the lights and flicked a paper football back and forth the aisle between the beds to each other for hours; Sam hadn't been very talkative, but that was normal. Dean had been tired, too tired to do much but indulge in that game. Dad had left them money for food before he'd gone, so they must have eaten—

 

“Shit, shit,” Dean hissed, “shit,” scrambling to his feet. There was an envelope on the side-table where Dad had left two hundred dollars and it was gaping a little bit, as if small fingers had recently been inside.

 

He pulled it open and rifled through it—ten dollars were gone that he knew he hadn't spent so far.

 

Dean shoved the envelope down into his pocket next to the gun and ran from the room, pausing only long enough to lock the door.

* * *

 

His teeth were chattering by the time he got into the parts of Allagash that constituted a town; the streets were still dark, and only a few shop windows showed buttery light from their storefronts. The whole world was still asleep, and he'd seen no one on the sidewalks, only a few cars passing, and the chilly wind brushing by.

 

Dean peered into every window and alleyway and door-front he saw, kept one hand curled around the handle of his pistol. Still no sign of Sam, but he had an idea, now, where he might be.

 

There was a diner, JoAnn's, on one of these streets, and he'd been cursing himself since the motel, because odds were Sam was there, and it was Dean's fault—he'd been so tired the night before, so exhausted from waking at six to trudge two miles to school and two miles back, from making and unmaking the protections on the room without Dad to help him and checking and double-checking them and helping Sam with his book report, that he'd forgotten to use the money in the envelope to buy them dinner—and Sam had probably woken that morning with an empty stomach and gone out with that ten dollars in search of a hot breakfast, wandered down here all by himself in the frigid cold, and it was Dean's fault.

 

 _Stupid, stupid,_ he thought, hunching his shoulders against the cold. It was stinging his eyes raw. _So what if_ you _weren't hungry? You should have remembered. You can't even feed him? Stupid, stupid._

 

There was no excuse. He felt awful, sick, low in his stomach, and he knew even if he did get Sam back to the motel before Dad came back, he'd still deserve to be smacked for what he'd done. _Look out for Sammy._ That was his _only_ job, and he'd messed it up again.

 

JoAnn's was just around the curb with the crosswalk on it and its lights were on when he rounded the corner—glass-front, with the name painted on in bright red curling script, above the weekly specials—and there ( _thank God,_ his heart dropped out of his throat) in a far booth was Sam, his legs still too short for his feet to touch the floor, hunched over the table.

 

Dean tried not to make a scene out of the relief that he felt; he shouldered the door open, ignored the jangle of the bell overhead, and he quietly moved through the canned Muzak playing above the counter to the booth where Sam was sitting with a plate of eggs and bacon and toast and hash-browns. Sunny-side up, extra crispy. A mug of what looked like hot chocolate at his elbow. Silver fork clutched in his fingers and the bottle of Tabasco sauce close at hand.

 

He slid into the opposite seat. Sam didn't look at him.

 

“Hey,” Dean said, very softly. There was hardly any food left on the plate; Sam was scraping it up in giant forkfuls, all muddled together, his shoulders pulled in. Dean fidgeted, felt himself going low in the sticky red seat. There were a few crumpled bills and a bit of change scattered on the table next to his brother's arm.

 

He cleared his throat. “Sammy?”

 

Sam didn't say anything, but it wasn't his usual spiteful silence; it was the way he went quiet when he knew that, if he opened his mouth, he'd cry, or shout, or lose his temper, and Dean felt a twinge in his heart, like someone pinching and twisting at it.

 

So they sat there, in silence, and Dean watched him mop up every last bit of grease with his toast and suck the crumbs off his fingers and drain the mug of hot chocolate even though it was still steaming, and the waitress came by to put a glass of water down on the table and Dean watched that, too, watched the condensation drip off its sides and puddle around its base until it soaked a little into Sam's paper napkin.

 

When his plate was nearly spotless Sam finally sat back rigidly in his seat, looking resolutely at its white surface, his bow-mouth red with grease, and he still didn't say anything, though his face was a clamour of guilt and uncertainty.

 

Dean swallowed hard, scrubbed at his eyes—looked out the window because it hurt too much to look at Sam.

 

“I'm sorry, Sammy,” he said, and knew he didn't have to expand on what he was sorry for; Sam knew; they both knew, in the tightness of their little stomachs all too used to hunger.

 

“It's okay,” Sam said, very very softly.

 

And it wasn't okay; forgetting to feed his little brother was never _okay;_ sleeping too deeply to notice him sneaking out into the morning was the furthest possible thing from _okay._ For an instant Dean let himself feel blisteringly angry at Dad, for leaving them in that crap room with almost nothing for so long, just like he did everywhere else, too focused on a job that didn't even make him any money to care about his children who were always cold and always lonely and often starving, who weren't like any other children because they were too busy being grown-ups for one another at nine and thirteen—if he wasn't so scared of Dad's anger and the flat of his hand, Dean thought, he'd stand up to him when he got back from the border and tell him exactly what he thought of him.

 

But it was his fault too, he felt, even though Sam didn't seem to blame him. His fault for neglecting his one responsibility.

 

“You can't do that again,” he said, finally, once he'd mustered the strength to look at his brother again. “Okay? I know it was my fault but you can't go off like that. You had me so scared.”

 

Sam shrank in his seat, still looking at his empty plate. “I'm sorry,” he said.

 

“It's okay,” Dean said, and _that_ was true, because how could he blame a little kid for trying to feed himself? He couldn't. “It's okay, Sammy. I'm not mad, but you can't—you can't do that.”

 

“I was hungry,” Sam said, in the smallest possible voice, and Dean could see tears welling up in his red eyes, and his heart plummeted. And he couldn't do anything—he sat there, immobile, while Sam bit at his red chapped lips and hot tears ran down his face as if he were _ashamed_ of himself for that meal he'd scraped off his plate and it was so wrong, so utterly wrong to see that, that Dean felt paralysed.

 

Abruptly Sam clambered off his seat and came around and put his arms around Dean's neck and buried his wet face in Dean's shoulder and just stood there, shaking a little, and Dean closed his eyes; the Muzak up above them kept wailing on until he stood, too, and grabbed up the change on the table and guided Sam back out into the cold bleak light of early morning, one arm around his brother's scrawny shoulders, and they walked back—faces into the wind—all the way to the motel, and when they got inside Dean put down the salt on the floor and found a station playing cartoons on the TV, and when Sam had washed his face off Dean wrapped them both up in blankets and they watched the screen blip and fuzz and change over for hours and hours, huddled up together. School and Dad be damned.

 

Dean walked down the corner store at lunchtime and ordered pizza for dinner and gave Sam the bigger portion of everything, too sick at heart to eat much himself anyway. But Sam still left half the pizza alone in the box, left it open on the table closer to Dean's bed, as if quietly saying, _that's yours, not mine. You need to eat, too._

 

When Dad finally came home, a few days later, neither of them said anything about it. It was their secret. In those long cold dark months that followed to the end of the year, on the protruding tip of the country, Sam never ran away again.

* * *

 

_Moscow, Tennessee_

_Summer 1993_

 

Sam hit double-digits with the turning of another summer and somewhere in the turn he lost something in himself; Dean was sure of that. He just couldn't put his finger on what it was.

 

Dad was home more these days, which was both a blessing and a curse. He drank enough to put a smaller man in the ground, but luckily he was a placid drunk more often than an angry one. When he wasn't out in the boonies nosing out cases he was sitting in the uneasy sunlight inside the room, Jack in one hand, sometimes his journal open on his knee, or the radio rattling off some sermon that he never listened to.

 

It was hard to be around him like that, so Sam and Dean left—spent their days exploring Moscow, rambling up and down the streets and the hillsides, into the trees and down again. It was a turbid summer. Sam seemed to have a keen ability to find cricks and streams and they'd sit down on their banks, bare feet in the water, watching fish swim by and disappear, or the hot clouds steam by above them, listening to vanishing roar of semi-trucks on the highway at their backs.

 

They hit tennis balls with sticks or played catch, or scrounged around in the change-catchers of vending machines for enough coins for a popsicle at the corner store. Never enough for each of them to have their own—only ever enough for one, which they snapped in half between them.

 

Sam took a liking to climbing the ancient, bending tree out back behind the motel, and would sit up there for hours, feet flat against the bark, in the old jean-shorts that Dean had cut out for him from a pair of Levi's. What he did up there, Dean wasn't sure; but the more Sam clambered up its twisted trunk and settled himself into the cradle of the branches, quiet and isolated of an afternoon, the more Dean got the sinking feeling that something was changing in him.

 

And he saw it, more and more, like a cloud passing over the sun, the longer that Tennessee summer crept; something different in Sam's smile, a stiff shift in his walk. He learned how to throw knives that July, and there were days when Dean saw him wander up into the hills near the road by himself to practise with them—he'd skulk a little ways behind, watching him, and sometimes he saw that Sam would lose himself in those blades like he'd once lost himself in books. It was strange to see that. It was sad.

 

Gone were the days of the incessant questions about hunting and about where Dad had gone; when their father left now, Sam said goodbye with a neutral face, never asked what he was hunting or when he'd be back or if he'd be safe. There was a chasm opening between Dad and Sam, and Dean saw it—like a crack in the fabric of the world—and he was powerless to stop it; it was the kind of thing that only got bigger with time, and he dreaded it. Now Sam was quiet, content to wander in the woods with Dean, but there was a shadow of something blooming behind his face, and Dean saw that too—wondered at it, worried about it.

 

Sam's eyes were getting flat and old and there was blackness behind them and that scared Dean, because his own eyes were like that, too. And he'd first noticed it in himself when it had become clear to him, for the first time, years ago, that this was his life, and it was never going to change—it was going to be poor and uncertain and unstable forever. And if Sam had that knowledge now, too—ten years old, well—it broke his heart.

 

And there was nothing to be done. There was no way to get that big, bright baby-smile back on Sam's face, not now. The more Dad drank, the more they moved on, the more schools they went into and came out of, the more towns they added to the list in their wake, the worse it would get; before long another year would pass and Sam would be another year older and he was only going to get sharper and sadder and meaner and darker, and Dean wished more than anything that he could take all that back. Keep Sam's sunshine and innocence and wide, fickle eyes the way they'd been before he'd known the truth, before Christmas two years ago, before he'd read Dad's journal and given up the amulet that still hung around Dean's neck and grew hot in the sun. Before he'd shot up those trees in Jerusalem. But there was only going forward—never hit the same town twice; never look back; those were Dad's rules, his commandments. To be followed absolutely.

 

Dean wished sometimes that he could stop time here, in this place, pause it in the middle of summer and never shift into anything else again. But the trees began to brown before he even knew the season was over; they lost their tennis ball in the creek one day; when September came they moved on again, always on, always forward, and Dean twisted to look at Moscow vanishing behind the Impala, imagining a bright little version of Sam standing there on the edge of the highway, waving goodbye, never to be seen again.

 

The real Sam sat in the back-seat, head lolling on the leather, watching the scenery go by. It was just another move, for him. There was nothing special in Moscow; nothing he was even aware of leaving behind.

 

When the sun began to set, as they pushed into Georgia, Dean watched him in the rear-view mirror, tracking the shadows as they passed and carved over his face, chiseling out the hollows beneath his cheekbones and the corners of his eye sockets, making him bony and pale and gaunt, as if to cut him to pieces.


	9. IX

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

“Did you hear about the haunted house?” Ben said, when he burst through the door and dropped his backpack on the floor, and Dean straightened, bewildered.

 

“Hello to you too,” he said, and then said, “what?”

 

Lisa followed in after her son, rolling her eyes and closing the door, and she gave Dean a pointed look when she passed into the kitchen. Ben crouched down to dig through his backpack, excitable.

 

“Seth told me that, like, there was a big black van outside?” Dean leaned against the side of the couch, crossed his arms. “And there were people in there all night, you know, doing investigating? They're a club or a society or something.”

 

“Paranormal investigators?”

 

“Yeah,” Ben said, and snorted, looking up at Dean with a conspiratorial grin. “I bet they're not half as good as you, though.”

 

“Ben,” Lisa said, in warning, from the kitchen.

 

“ _You_ should go hunt the ghost,” Ben said, dropping his voice. “I bet you'd do better than them.”

 

Dean forced a smile. “Yeah, sure. Maybe.”

 

“Ben, get in here and get started on your homework.”

 

Ben sighed, grabbed up something from his backpack and went obediently into the kitchen with his mother, and Dean leaned against the couch for a while longer, eyes locked on the middle distance.

 

It was January—two weeks since he'd spoken to Cas; the New Year had come and gone and the calendar in the kitchen had been replaced, folded up and tucked away in the stacks of all the others in the study. Work, thankfully, had picked up, but it was in a lull again now. He was dreading the expanse of the next week with nothing in it.

 

“Seth tell you the name of the, uh—society?” Dean called, keeping his voice nonchalant, down the hall.

 

“Dean,” Lisa said, with that same warning tone.

 

“Midwestern—something?” Ben replied, and there was a brief scuffle of lowered voices, and he said nothing else.

 

Lisa swung her head around the corner a moment later, her black hair falling against her face like a curtain.

 

She raised her eyebrows and mouthed, “What are you doing?”

 

Dean shrugged.

 

Lisa glanced back down the hall to be sure Ben was still doing his work, and then came into the living room, one hand on her hip; she pushed up briefly onto her tiptoes to kiss Dean hello, and he closed his eyes, easy under her touch.

 

“I thought this stupid house was old news,” she said, low enough that Ben couldn't hear, against his lips.

 

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. If they've got a team out there—”

 

Lisa sighed. “Yeah, a team with a skull and crossbones painted on their van. I've seen it.” She rocked back onto her heels, reached up to smoothe his shirt against his shoulder. “That poor family's probably being taken in for everything they've got.”

 

Dean didn't respond; he didn't think it wise to tell her he'd been driving out there during the winter to keep an eye on the Okoro house. It still didn't seem haunted—but from what he knew of the man of the house, he didn't seem the type to waste money on a research team if there was nothing of substance to research.

 

“Ben's right, though,” Lisa said, twisting her lip reluctantly. “I mean, honestly. If those poor people really are being, you know—haunted—you'd be a better help to them than the _Midwestern Professionals Paranormal Research Society_.”

 

“You think?”

 

“Mm. I think.”

 

They stood there a while—her hand resting carelessly at his hip—simply existing; after a moment her eyes flickered up to his face.

 

“You been okay?” she asked, softly.

 

Dean looked down between them.

 

“Yeah,” he said eventually—a thick little lie—and he smiled as best he could at her. “I think so.”

 

“You know,” she said slowly, “if that place really _is_ a case, and if you wanted to take it—”

 

“Lis.”

 

“—if it would do you good, get your blood flowing—I wouldn't be against it.” She looked him hard in the eyes, though he shied back a little away from her. “I mean, it doesn't seem all that dangerous. And you're going to be so cooped up this week—”

 

“Lisa.”

 

She sighed, settled—let her forehead bump against his collarbone for a moment.

 

“I don't like what you used to do,” she murmured. “You know that. I just mean—if you wanted to. If the temptation ever crossed your mind. It's part of you. You know?”

 

She hesitated then, for a second.

 

“And maybe it could be—I don't know.” She took a breath, gathered herself. “A kind of closure?”

 

He looked down at the curve of her black hair, its curling at the nape of her neck, unsure what to say.

 

“Lis,” he said softly, “I don't do that anymore.”

 

Lisa raised her head, looked at him again; let her lips rest gently on the corner of his mouth for an instant; then she drifted back and away, her hand lingering just a moment on his waist; she turned and disappeared down the hall like a ghost herself, and he stood there in the living room, itching under his skin.

* * *

 

But he did go to the house, despite what he'd said.

 

She was right. A hunt like this, simple and clean and uncomplicated, would provide a kind of closure, if he chose to take it. Sort of like a bookend on that part of his life, he supposed, and he knew, though he was rusty, that he was still up to it—if the case existed at all.

 

He parked down the street as usual, just as night was falling, and pulled at his mouth. The paranormal society's van was out front, but its back doors were open and people were coming in and out to the van and back with armfuls of stupidly advanced equipment. They looked like they were leaving. Dean recognised Mr Okoro standing in the open doorway, watching them work.

 

He frowned. Why would the so-called professionals be leaving? Had they fixed the problem all by themselves?

 

He doubted it.

 

Dean watched until the front door of the house closed, and loitered there a moment longer. The Midwestern Paranormal people were still loading things into their van. They didn't look too happy.

 

He could take this, he realised. If something really was happening in that house, he could fix it, and in less time than a bunch of hacks in a black van. And it would do no harm to anyone. Even if it did pull up memories, he wasn't interested in keeping those down anymore.

 

Dean thought of Castiel, sitting across from him in that coffeeshop, quietly urging him to keep his promises. If he was ever going to let go of what his life had been once, when he'd still had a family on this Earth—maybe this was how to go about it. One last hurrah. A six-gun salute to the closing of the open road.

 

He got out of the truck before he could stop himself.

 

It was windy and cold and he'd neglected to bring anything to cover his bare throat but he jogged across the street anyway, hands stuffed into pockets, eyeing the closed-up windows of the house as he went. A girl with a ponytail was overseeing some acne-faced kid as he arranged and re-arranged things with wires in the back of the van, like some fragile game of Tetris; when she heard Dean's boots on the sidewalk she turned.

 

Dean gave her a grin that he hoped was friendly. “Hey.”

 

The girl looked him up and down. “Can I help you with something? We're trying to head out.”

 

“Yeah, um, I thought so—you guys were working that house, right?” Dean said—he could feel himself slipping into his old habits of lying and smooth-talking as easily as if he'd never left. He leaned conspiratorially towards the girl, ticking an eyebrow. Ignorant Suburban Dude. “Is it really—you know?”

 

The girl's eyes darted to the house and back; her jaw set into place. “What? Haunted?”

 

Dean nodded.

 

“Of course it is. Why else would we be here?” With a disdainful flick of her ponytail she turned back to the kid in the van.

 

“So you guys are, like, professionals, huh? You ever get a ghost on film?” He stepped off the curb, the more to annoy her—she seemed the type to spill when annoyed—and she gave a heavy sigh, shifting sideways away from him.

 

“Yes,” she said, biting the word out through the cold.

 

“You're all finished here, or what?”

 

“Sir, we're on a tight schedule,” the girl snapped, keeping her eyes firmly averted from him.

 

“So the ghost's gone, or—”

 

“Look,” the girl said, whipping around on him faster than he'd expected—he stepped back up onto the curb—“this house is above our pay-grade. We're done here. If you're interested in our services we have a number on the website.” She gave him a withering glare, shouted “hurry up, _Dave,_ ” at the acne-faced kid in the van, and disappeared behind the driver's-side, leaving Dean alone on the sidewalk, the looming house at his back.

 

A moment later the doors on the van closed from the inside, and the engine started up, and with a brief blink of headlights it rolled down the street and away from him and into the dark.

 

Dean stood there, gnawing his lip, for a long time, thinking.

 

The house was like a creature all its own, behind him, and he realised that this was the closest he'd been to it so far—he turned on his heel to look at it, where the peak of its roof was blending into the blackening sky.

 

 _This house is above our pay-grade._ And there really wasn't much else that could mean—whatever was going on in there was too much for people who apparently did this for a real living, people he knew from experience would never give up on a chance to wring gullible families dry for their _investigations._

 

Greedy-ass amateurs hadn't lasted a week inside this place. Maybe there was something here after all.

 

And maybe Lisa was right. Maybe this was something he needed.

* * *

 

“Do you really think I should look into that house on Caplin?”

 

“Why?” Lisa said, rounding the corner of the master bathroom with her hair tangled in a towel. “Are you thinking there's a job there?”

 

For no real reason, Dean pushed against the windowpane, testing the lock. It held. The glass was cold as ice against his knuckles.

 

He shrugged. “I was thinking about what you said—”

 

“Uh-huh.”

 

“I dunno.” He turned, leaned against the window. Two spots of brilliant frost against his shoulder-blades. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, head bowed, tousling out her wet black hair, and after a moment she looked back up at him, all attention. “Might be good for me.”

 

Lisa smiled, gently.

 

Dean crossed the floor to sit next to her, snag a stray drop of water from her cheek with his thumb. She balled up the towel and pushed it into her lap, said nothing.

 

“But if I do take this case,” he said, keeping his eyes low, in the safe places of her collarbone and throat, “then when it's done— _I'm_ done. With all of that, forever.”

 

Lisa hummed softly in her throat—laid her hand against his knee. He cleared his throat.

 

“I'm gonna sell all the guns,” he said, trying very hard not to think about what that meant; “I'm gonna get rid of everything I have from back then that we don't absolutely need and then I'm through.”

 

“You sure?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Lisa sighed, put her towel aside on the bed, the tips of her fingers coursing lightly over the material of his sweats.

 

“I mean—I'll applaud you for trying. But honestly, Dean,” she said, in the tone of voice that meant he had to look at her, “do you really think you can do that? Just—empty out all the things you've got left over and be a whole new person?”

 

He shrugged. “That's what I'm here for, isn't it? That stuff is pretty much all I have left to get rid of.”

 

Which wasn't quite true. But there wasn't much else to be said.

 

“Last hunt, huh?” Lisa said, after a time. She laughed a little, in her throat. “What do you think? Is it gonna be a memorable one?”

 

 _First hunt since Sam, last ghost I'll ever put down, last bastion of my whole life? Of course it'll be memorable; it'll be like dying,_ he thought, but he didn't say it; just pushed a strand of her wet hair behind her ear and kissed her forehead and got up to brush his teeth for bed.

* * *

 

It was harder now, of course, to insert himself into places where he wasn't meant to be; he was a local at this point, and people knew his face, especially on Caplin Street. Fake badges and fake names wouldn't cut it in Cicero where people knew him as Lisa Braeden's boyfriend. He had to find a believable lie to get him past the front door of the Okoro house.

 

He drove past it a few more times the next day until inspiration hit.

 

When he rang the bell, bouncing on his feet in the cold, Mrs Okoro answered.

 

She looked like Hell—bags beneath her eyes, a mouth creased down by frown lines, and she looked at him with a mixture of exhaustion and distrust.

 

“Can I help you?”

 

“Actually, ma'am, I might be able to help you,” Dean said, digging into his pocket for one of the cheap business cards he knew he kept in there—his boss at the construction company made everyone keep at least a few on them at all times. He held it out, and she took it, squinted down at the black lacquered name, _Hamilton County Roofing & Construction, _and then she squinted up at him.

 

“Couldn't help but notice you've got some hail damage up there,” Dean said, gesturing aimlessly in the direction of the roof. “From that storm this summer?”

 

Mrs Okoro nodded, very slowly.

 

“Now I know you folks have been—preoccupied, so you haven't gotten around to fixing it—”

 

“What do you want, sir?” Mrs Okoro said, weary as anything.

 

Dean cleared his throat. “If it's not too forward, ma'am, I've got some downtime in my schedule right now, and I could easily patch all that up for you in less than a week.”

 

Mrs Okoro looked up at her ceiling, and then back down at him; she twisted her mouth a little, and he could hear her clicking her tongue behind her teeth, considering. She looked like a scared animal, he thought. Worrisome.

 

“I don't know if we can afford your company's rates,” she said, after a long time.

 

Dean thought of that ridiculous black van, and how much assholes like those probably charged for their quack operations; she was probably right.

 

“I could at least take a look?” he offered, shrugging. “Give you an estimate based on how bad it is? No charge for that, of course.”

 

Mrs Okoro didn't say anything—just looked at him, anxious. Her nerves seemed fried, and no wonder, if this place was really as bad as the Midwestern people had made it seem.

 

After a long time she stepped back, opened the door a little, ducked her head.

 

“Attic's upstairs. Door at the end of the hall,” she said. “If you want to take a look.”

 

Dean felt a wave of triumphant relief. He hadn't lost his touch, then, after all.

 

“Thank you, ma'am,” he said, squeezing in past her. “Won't be long.”

* * *

 

Clearly something had shifted since he'd first laid eyes on this family. The house was nice enough—well-kept, everything in its place—but the air inside was _oppressive_ ; most of the doors were closed and, on inspection, locked. The kids' rooms were empty and as morose as any child's room he'd ever seen. They didn't look lived-in at all, and when he rounded the balcony on the second floor where it overlooked the main room, he saw why—the living room floor was crowded with mattresses, and half-open suitcases on the floor out of which clothes were spilling, and Mrs Okoro wandering across the tangle of sheets and pillows into the kitchen down below.

 

Sleeping in the same room; safety in numbers. Dean swallowed hard. He'd seen a few families do that before, and it was always when something really evil moved through their halls.

 

But the attic was where the violence had been in this house, so he made his way down the corridor to the attic door. It opened easily.

 

Up a few stairs and around another corner and he was in—he had to stoop to walk; the rafters were low. Sunlight broke down onto its slatted floors through holes in the roof, and cold wind too, and Dean ducked around them, looking up at their ragged edges. This place definitely needed repair work, but he wasn't here for that.

 

It wasn't hard to figure out who the guilty spirit was in this house—it was the young man who'd killed himself up here, years ago, and was probably buried in the cemetery near the center of town. But Dean sat down carefully in the corner of one wall anyway, crossing his legs, breath frosting; he needed proof before he jeopardised his job and his home to dig up a corpse like that.

 

He wasn't likely to get any in daylight, but he sat, quietly, hoping.

 

Dean breathed a long sigh, looking up at the punctures in the shingles, the spots on the wooden floor where rot and mold was beginning to set in. That'd need to be fixed, too, once these poor people were in the right frame of mind to care about things like rot and mold. The last thing they needed was a ceiling collapsing while they were fending off a malevolent ghost.

 

It was deadly quiet up here but for the occasional whistle of the wind against the holes; there was nothing stored up here—only cobwebs and silence, and the hum of the heater downstairs.

 

He wished Sam was there. If for nothing else than conversation, he wished he wasn't alone up here. Wished he could look over into the corner to see his brother trying not to bash his head on the roof, poking into niches and nooks and crannies for anything interesting, rattling off some banal fact about the build of the house, getting his hair caught in a spiderweb—anything.

 

Hunting had always been more fun with Sam. God, but they'd always found something to laugh about in places like these—stupid jokes about Scooby Doo, or an awkward family photo on the mantle—and he'd never said it but Dean knew that Sam had always liked haunted houses best. They'd let him see people, know them. Glimpse the order of their lives. Touch the counterpanes and cedar chests and bathroom mirrors he'd never had. Maybe let himself pretend that he owned them, once in a while.

 

Now he was alone in an attic Sam would have loved and he couldn't even look forward to going back to the motel to tell him about it, to brag about how easily he'd gotten inside. This case would be over in less than a week and then he was done, and there'd be no more haunted houses, and that was just one more little thing he was going to lose.

 

Dean blinked down at the slatted floor to keep tears from rising in the cold—reached inside his pocket on a whim to pull out his keys.

 

The wood was swollen and soft with recent rain. He gouged Sam's name in deep, in pointed pale letters, as deep as the sharp edges of his house key would go. Ran his fingers over the splintery result so that it came away clean, three little letters no one would ever notice in a windy attic he would never see again, but Sam liked haunted houses.

 

_S A M._

 

So this was here for him.

* * *

 

He left before he could let himself linger too long. Told Mrs Okoro he needed to talk to his boss about the pricing but he'd be in touch. Drove to the library to look up the records of the man who'd killed himself in their attic, pulled up the report on the Midwestern Paranormal website, ran the two side by side. They seemed to match up. The man who'd died in there had been an abusive drunk, by all accounts—left bruises on his wife and kid just like the bruises Mrs Okoro and her children had found on themselves; neighbours said his shouting had rattled the walls, just like their walls had rattled in the night. Things thrown and smashed, howling voices in the empty space beneath the roof.

 

He still wanted proof before he exhumed the body—wanted to see the spirit with his own eyes, to be certain—but for now there was nothing to do but wait for the right time to get back into the house again.

 

Dean sighed, leaned back in the library chair—looked hard at the potential spirit's pixellated corporeal face staring at him from the computer screen.

 

The space at his right felt empty and cold.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_1994-1995_

 

There were scares. There were long black nights that only seemed to get longer the lankier Sam got, the taller Dean grew against the side of the Impala. In most places the only comfort they got on nights like those were the glow of the stars in the wide empty country sky, peering in through their windows, and the rest was discomfort—cold rooms with broken radiators, Dad gone for weeks sometimes, whole weeks, convinced now that Dean was old enough to be in charge of his brother for so long without help. And though he was, there were still scares—childish fear coming back up like bile sometimes, when tree branches scraped at windows, or locks rattled, or when Sam came down sick and Dean wasn't sure who to call.

 

Once, in North Dakota, Dad took deep gashes to the arm and the face from the clawed thing they were hunting and only had time to yank them from the back seat and thrust them back into the room before he was off again, off after the thing, screaming down the road, steam grinding out behind the Impala in his wake, and Dean covered in his father's blood and Sam's eyes wide and full of fright, and Dean sat in the window that whole night, his sawed-off propped up against the glass, and Sam lying down with his head in his lap, fitfully asleep. And Dean watched, even when his eyes itched and drooped, even when the blood dried in his eyebrows and his eyelashes, watched while the dark folded and faded down into the sunrise, waiting for Dad to come back—half-expecting him to never appear on the road up to the room again. Half-expecting to have to rouse his brother and wander out into the world by themselves, orphans at last, alone in the heat and the cracking weeds with just a shotgun and worn-in shoes.

 

But Dad came back, grotesquely triumphant, and Dean was too exhausted to clean the blood from his face, so Sam did it. Standing on tip-toes in the bathroom, his eleven-year-old fingers bunched up in a wet rag, his knuckles stained red, and he didn't say a word. Just bit his lip and concentrated. Dean was too tired to thank him, but he wished for weeks afterward that he had.

 

There were other scares, harder, sharper ones. Something smart with wings and talons escaped Dad in Wisconsin and was almost halfway into the room where they slept, climbing through the window near Sam's bed, before Dean woke and swung up over his brother's body and shot it in the face. They'd had to split fast that night, ditch the room and the shrieking creature's flapping, brutalised body stuck in the window, ducking behind the motel to avoid the revolving red-and-blue lights that came in response to the gunshot. They'd huddled in the cold next to the dumpsters until Dad came back and found them and snatched their things from the room and spirited them away from that town, away from the thick black blood on the window ledge. They'd had to leave some things behind. And that seemed to become a trend—things got lost, things stayed behind, and Dean couldn't help but notice that ever since Moscow a year, two years ago, it was happening to Sam, too, and still happening.

 

Pieces coming off. Flakes, like gold, peeling off and turning to ash. He supposed it was called _growing up_ , but it still struck him as strange, that Sam could _do_ that. That Sam was getting taller, skinnier, his hair longer, his eyes sharper, his mouth tighter, and though Dean still glimpsed him sometimes and saw the toddler who'd first walked to him across a hotel floor more than ten years ago, more and more it was Sam, the eleven-year-old, the twelve-year-old, the one with the sense of the humour, the crooked teeth, the nut-brown sun-kissed skin and the dimples in his smile. The one who could lift things from store aisles and gas-station racks now just as easily as he could pick a lock with a paperclip, who was better with a pistol than Dean, but not as good with a rifle. He befriended stray dogs on the streets and sometimes he swore when Dad wasn't around and he studied, bent over motel tables in harsh lamplight at night, his tongue between his teeth, and passed classes with flying colours even though no one but Dean cared enough to tell him they were proud.

 

It seemed every year that they only got poorer. Whatever money they'd had in the early years after Mom's death was gone. It was spare change and credit card scams now, and Sam and Dean sitting cross-legged on the floor carefully cutting coupons out of newspapers and grocery store catalogues with their Swiss Army knives, milking those slips of paper for everything they were worth. A bottle of orange juice in the motel fridge was how they knew they were doing alright.

 

Sam got lean and hungry and not only from lack of food. Dean saw it, and didn't know what to do about it. Sometimes it thrilled him, a little, when he caught glimpses of himself in Sam, when he saw him field-strip a gun with as much expertise as their father and flick his hair out of his eyes to put it back together, when he found himself saying “yes, sir” to Dad in tandem with him. And sometimes it scared him. Sometimes he saw the fire in Sam's eyes and shrank from it. No fire, he thought, no fire like that had any business in a twelve-year-old's eyes. It was ambition; it was fierceness; it was desperate, angry longing for the kids Sam saw on playgrounds, or the white picket-fences they loitered outside while Dad went in to talk to the family. It was disgust for how well he field-stripped those guns. And sometimes—sometimes it was aimed at Dean, Sam's starving gaze; it curled, sharp and hot, against the hollow of his throat, and he didn't understand it. He was sixteen; he knew, now, how to kiss girls, and how to keep himself carefully separate from the rest of the world, to minimise the pain of leaving every place they came to. He was sixteen and getting good at being who he was, and it disrupted all that, thinking about the way Sam looked at him sometimes, as if he were the sun and the solution all at once.

 

There was Montana and Wyoming, Mississippi and New Hampshire, the Gulf of Mexico and Mount St Helens; there were witches, lake monsters, skinwalkers and poltergeists, and some of them came for Sam and Dean, and some of them didn't.

 

In Nevada Dean shot a werewolf through the heart with a silver-tipped arrow one night and let the soot from the thing's ashes stain his face until it was silvery-grey and he felt savage and proud, and Sam wouldn't look at him for a week.

 

And there were the times Sam went missing, for a night sometimes, or two. On Dad's watch it was always rebellion, always an attempt to make him mad, to show him that he didn't control Sam as much as he liked, and whenever he was finally dragged in there was shouting and smacks and Dean would haul him out back and shout at him some more, grip his stupid face in his hands and beg him with his eyes to stop doing that, to stop causing trouble. After a while it was just hard to take.

 

But when he ran off on Dean's watch, it wasn't to hurt him, Dean knew. It was because Sam was a twelve-year-old boy and a restless one at that, and the world he lived in was huge and full of teeth and it was frightening and he wanted none of it. It wasn't hard to bring him home, those times. He was always hiding out in the nearest park, eating beef jerky on a swing-set, or camping out behind the fence of a friend he'd made at school. When Dean found him he'd look up at him and not say anything at all and quietly, meekly, come back with him, back to the room or the empty house or the shack on the county road, and Dean buried all those flights of fear and never breathed a word of them to Dad.

 

As long as Sam came home again, as long as Sam came back to him, he could wander if he needed to. Dean understood that need.

 

There were birthdays with nothing in them. Days of driving for twelve, sixteen hours, both of them slumped together in the back seat, Sam breathing softly through his sleep against Dean's shoulder, Dean watching the leaves fall or the snow drift or the sun burst across the flattening sky. Weeks of Wonderbread and expired peanut butter and water from the spigot of the hose. Hours of listening to Sam sharpening the blade of his favourite knife, grinding it down to a deadly edge, and looking at him and thinking of how he seemed so much older than his still-growing bones. Two years of smokestacks pushing into Ohio fog, graffiti and manhole covers, skin getting tough with scars, the smell of books of lore clinging to Sam like a following cloud of dust, filling Dean's head whenever they wrestled on the hard motel floor. Dark days, and only slivers of light breaking in across his little brother's cheek, softening him for an instant before carving away again, and his hungry mosaic eyes glimmering in streetlight and moonlight.

 

Gasoline; Child Services made a grab for them in Rhode Island. Things building up and falling away on the edge of the world too fast for Dean to remember completely even only hours afterward. Sam building up and falling away, like a strange little willowy tree, as familiar to Dean as the back of his own calloused hand and as unfamiliar, too, as every new unknown town, every half-abandoned Sinclair station, every wilderness on either side of the two-lane road. Twelve years old and he seemed to be the mystery of everything around him, and Dean didn't know what was fiercer: his fear of that bigness in such a small boy, or his love.

* * *

 

_Idanha, Oregon_

_July 1996_

 

They made it back to the hotel just in time—half an hour before Dad was due back, fifteen minutes before the earliest he'd appear.

 

For a minute they sat there, the both of them, the Impala idling and then coming down into silence when Dean twisted the key back, their breath steaming up the window from the inside, looking at the moth-filled light above the door. They were both breathless. Dean had broken the speed limit at least twice to get them back on time, before Dad came back and realised they were gone, out in the wilderness of someone's ranch-land shooting cheap fireworks up into the wet black sky—and he'd seen Sam gripping the handle of his door with a grin on his face every time Dean sped up, every time the raindrops fell just a little harder as they coursed down the highway. His grey hoodie was smeared with mud and his face was, too. Dean had to suppress a laugh, glimpsing him in the rear-view mirror. He'd slipped in the wet smoking grass as they were running back to the car, too aware of the time.

 

The lot was dark and spotty with the rain that had fallen over them on their way back and now the car smelled like mud and sparklers, and Sam was staring at the closed door of the room with big eyes. The look on his face was the same look he got every time he knew they'd pulled off something they weren't meant to.

 

“Go on in,” Dean said, reaching over the smack lightly at Sam's arm, reluctant to break the moment but acutely aware that Dad's truck would be coming up any minute. “Get that mud off your face before Dad sees.”

 

Sam jumped a little at the sound of his voice and looked at him, then nodded, hair dripping onto his knees. He popped the door and jogged up and around the glare of Dean's headlights, fumbled with the room key and then disappeared inside. Left it open just a little, a rectangle of light.

 

Dean sighed, relaxed back into the leather.

 

He couldn't help smiling a little; couldn't help pausing to lean against the side of the Impala when he swung out a moment later to light a cigarette—bad habit he'd picked up last year—and let the drizzle cool him down. Off down the parking lot there was only one other light on and then there was sky, and he could almost imagine the blue smoke of their fireworks was somewhere out there obscuring the stars, still.

 

Sam had been right. Dad would never have let them do that, if he'd known Dean intended it. He was extra-paranoid these days, for whatever reason. Hardly ever let them out of his sight unless it was with an order to stay in the room and answer the door for no one. He was shifty, suspicious—slept with his shotgun fully loaded under his pillow and insisted his boys do the same, but wouldn't tell them why. Dean thought maybe it had to do with the Monster, capital M, or something like that, but he didn't particularly care to find out.

 

If Dad had known Dean wanted to take Sam out into the wilds, largely unprotected, with a milk crate full of fireworks—Dean let smoke hiss out from his nose, the way a girl in Washington had showed him once—he'd have taken it out of Dean's ass, that was for sure. He could almost imagine the lecture— _haven't you got any sense, boy,_ probably, _you are seventeen and reckless,_ and maybe he would have said _well, yes I am, sir, and that's grown-up enough to leave me with my kid brother for weeks on end, and I don't see how it's not grown-up enough to have some fun every now and then._ But in all likelihood—he took another drag, watched the end of the cigarette light up orange—in all likelihood, he wouldn't have said a thing.

 

It was true, though. Dad's paranoia wasn't his, and it sure as hell wasn't Sam's. And he _was_ seventeen. He smoked a pack a day, and he could hold his liquor, and he'd kissed a boy three months ago out behind the high school in Wyoming and he'd enjoyed it—not that anyone would ever know. He was more grown-up, he knew, at seventeen than Dad had been. It was well within his jurisdiction to use his hard-earned pool money on a few Roman Candles to put a smile on his little brother's face.

 

Those smiles were getting rare, and they were precious. Dean knew that. Dad didn't understand. Dad looked at Sam and saw a little green toy soldier, like the ones Dean had played with as a kid. He didn't see a child. He saw a gun mount.

 

So that was Dean's job, he'd decided for himself. To make sure Sam never thought of himself as a tool.

 

In that field he'd been a child. Thirteen. Spinning around in those sparks like he was dancing in the rain. Bob Dylan muffled against the closed-up windows of the car parked in the grass. That had been good.

 

Dean wasn't one for taking pictures, but he wished he'd had a Kodak or something out there. If only to get one blurry washed-out image of Sam grinning at him under the flash and the bang in the sky. If only to catch hold of a little bit of that fire, that wildness, that was only getting bigger in his little brother's skin the older he got, that still managed to put a little wonder in Dean. It seemed like something he was going to want to remember, someday, when things were different.

 

He'd come to realise, this last year, that he didn't understand Sam.

 

He glanced towards the open door—behind it, whisps of steam were whispering out from the bathroom—threw his cigarette down and ground it into the concrete with his heel. Went inside.

 

No, he didn't understand his little brother very well at all. He was too smart, and not kid-smart, but grown-up-smart—as smart as Dean was, at the very least. And he saw things, still, the way Dean had known he'd seen things as a baby. Not dangerous things; not things on the other side of any veil, but possibilities—hopes. Dreams. He could tell you Sam's favourite colour (dark, dark red) or how long it took him to brush his teeth or how long it took him to fall asleep but he couldn't for the life of him begin to know what went on behind those summery eyes sometimes.

 

But that was alright.

 

Dean closed the door behind him. The shower was on, and Sam's muddy jacket was draped over the luggage rack outside the bathroom.

 

“You almost done? Dad's gonna be back soon,” Dean called, picking up the jacket with two fingers and depositing it in the sink. He turned the water on as hot as it would go, plugged up the drain. The bathroom door was open and he could see the shadow of Sam's skinny body behind the curtain out of the corner of his eye.

 

“Can you grab me boxers or something?”

 

“Nah.” Dean smiled a little, watching water swirl in the sink basin.

 

“Dean, come on.”

 

“I'm washing your jacket, get your own underwear.”

 

The shower shunted abruptly off and Sam's arm reached out to snatch a towel from the rack. A minute later he came out, holding it tight around his waist, and he elbowed Dean as he passed by. “Jerk.”

 

Dean didn't say anything, but watched in the mirror over the sink while Sam tried his best to unzip his duffel sideways with only one hand. He pumped some soap into the sink and turned off the faucet and set to scrubbing the dirt and the grass stains from the fabric.

 

Sam paused in the doorway as he was going back into the bathroom. “Hey. You got some—” He gestured ambiguously with his fist full of clothes around his neck. “On your collar.”

 

Dean left the hoodie to soak in the water and shouldered into the bathroom with Sam, who was struggling to put on boxers without dropping his towel. He'd nearly succeeded when Dean pulled off his muddy shirt and then he lost his balance and stumbled into the wall behind him, and Dean craned a curious look over his shoulder.

 

“Contain yourself, Sammy,” he said, sarcastic, grinning.

 

Sam flushed a bright red and scowled at him, or at the joke, Dean wasn't sure; he didn't dwell on it. He reached in to wet a washcloth in the shower and scrub the dirt off his neck while Sam wrestled on a T-shirt and then the front door opened and they both froze.

 

Sam looked at him, eyes huge, and Dean could tell he was thinking frantically about the mud in the passenger seat and the jacket soaking in the sink and their mess of dirty clothes on the floor. He bit his lip, nervous, and Dean tossed his washrag into the shower and reached down to conspiratorially ruffle Sam's wet hair.

 

“Not a word,” he mouthed, hoping his expression was conveying the unspoken _I'll take care of it,_ and then he did something without thinking—planted a quick peck on the corner of Sam's mouth, for absolutely no reason other than to reassure him, and then he swung out around the corner of the door.

 

Dad was laying out his guns on the bed, and glanced up when Dean appeared.

 

“What have you boys been up to?” he said, without much interest, taking only a slow moment to register Dean's naked chest and what was probably still a smear of mud on his neck.

 

Dean shrugged, cleared his throat. “Just, uh. Went down to the lobby for a Coke. Washing up.”

 

“You haven't been out.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

“Because I didn't give you permission to go out.”

 

“No, sir.”

 

Dad looked at him hard, but his gaze was exhausted, and he didn't say anything else; didn't seem to notice the full sink and the muddy jacket, or the fact that both his sons were cooped up in the bathroom at the same time.

 

When he sank down on the edge of the bed to peel off his boots Dean swung back into the bathroom to give Sam the all-clear and found him standing there, barefoot on the tile, lanky body absolutely drowning in one of Dean's too-big T-shirts, face still wet from the shower, staring at him with a blush on his face so hot it could heat a small room.

 

Dean went still, uncertain, and then remembered. He'd kissed him. Why had he done that?

 

But brothers kissed brothers, sometimes. It wasn't strange. They saw it on TV all the time. It didn't mean anything.

 

But Sam looked like he was about to burst, as if Dean had done something startling and new and incredible that he'd never done before.

 

“What?” Dean said, quietly, feeling his own face grow hot— _why that, too?—_ and he didn't wait for an answer, mostly because he was afraid, very suddenly, of what it might be. He left Sam in there, looking shell-shocked, and grabbed a shirt from his bag and settled down with a sitcom and tried not to think about his heart bumping in his chest, or how he could almost imagine the sound of Sam's heart doing the exact same thing in the other room.

 

Eventually, Sam came out of the bathroom, and settled down next to Dean just like every other night. He kept his knees drawn up and his arms closed in and didn't say anything about it, and didn't say anything the next day, either, or the next week, or the next month.

* * *

 

But sometimes Dean saw him, when Sam thought he wasn't looking, picking at his lips in the wing mirror, as if he didn't know what to do with them anymore.

 

Dean tried not to think about it. There was nothing to think about.


	10. X

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

Mrs Okoro called, two days later, amongst the drip and grey of January, to tell him that they would like to hire him to fix their roof. They were going to be leaving the house, she said, for a few weeks. Her husband had some vacation time. That was what she said, but Dean knew how it sounded when someone was hiding their fear under their tongue. She was terrified.

 

His boss was all too happy to hear that he was bringing in commission work. Sid offered to help out, but Dean declined.

 

He needed that house to himself.

* * *

 

Mrs Okoro had told him over the phone that they kept a spare key beneath a garden gnome outside the front door, so he didn't bother to pick the lock on his way in the next night.

 

They'd cleared out pretty much as soon as he'd called them back with the news that he'd start work on their roof that week. He'd seen them, parked a little ways down the street, piling luggage in the car and taking off down the street as if all Hell was at their heels. And judging by their eagerness to ditch their house, it probably was.

 

Now that he was finally here, it was just like any other hunt, and there was a comfort in that. The weight of the EMF meter in his hand, the feel of his shotgun full of rock salt against his shoulder, tiny flashlight between his teeth. The house was cold as the grave and his breath fogged out around the miniature Maglite's metal and for a moment—if he closed his eyes there in the front hall, the oppressive emptiness pushing at him like curious fingers—for a moment he could imagine it was two years back, and that Sam was somewhere up ahead of him, clearing rooms with his shotgun, padding on the perilous hardwood with the stealth of a cat.

 

But the hallway was empty when he opened his eyes.

 

He breathed. Went upstairs.

 

Dean had an instinct for hunts, and it hadn't gone away since he'd been out of the game. It was easy to tell when something was going to be simple and when it was going to be tricky, and this house wasn't tricky. He already had a suspect; all he needed tonight was proof, and then he could salt and burn that sonofabitch downtown and be back tomorrow morning to patch up the family's roof. And then—well, then he supposed it would be over—no more hunts, no more ghosts or ghouls or demons or shifters or anything ever again. Just Lisa's house and everything that came with it. Just—peace. Or whatever he was meant to make of it.

 

He switched on the EMF as he crept down the dark hall to the attic door, watched with cold eyes while the red lights slid up and down and it whined in his hand. This house was afire, and the whining only heightened the closer he got to the door. He tightened his finger a little against the shotgun, eyeing the doorknob, tongue in his cheek.

 

“I'm coming up there,” he called, around the flashlight. “You gonna show me your face, wifebeater? Or you gonna be a coward about it?”

 

There was no response from the attic, but the EMF spiked dramatically for an instant, and trembled in the direction of the door.

 

“Yeah, I know you're up there,” Dean murmured to himself, tucking his gun beneath his arm long enough to put away the EMF and switch on a bigger flashlight.

 

The attic door opened without a sound.

 

It was just as dank and dark up there as it had been when he'd first visited, only now the blackness was pitch, and the flashlight only illuminated ovals of space at a time. Dean crept in, hunched, feeling slow gushes of chilly air from the holes above his head every now and again.

 

He bit his tongue, sliding the light across the walls, across the floor, sweeping back and forth towards the opposite end of the room, alert for any sign of movement or any deeper drop in temperature. This bastard was probably going to try and scare him out—he seemed the type. Dean tensed, pre-emptively. He wasn't going to let any jump scare deter him from getting this done.

 

He did feel vulnerable, though he didn't want to think about it. It was just bizarre, frankly, to know he was here all alone, and that no one had his back, that only Lisa knew where he was, and she was miles away. He tried to bite that feeling down. It wouldn't do to smell of fear around a spirit like this.

 

But the attic seemed quiet. The arc of his light found the back wall and revealed nothing.

 

Dean sighed, straightened. Maybe the ghost _was_ taking the coward's route.

 

He stepped carefully across the floorboards, shoulders still tight, towards the spot on the swollen wood where he'd carved Sam's name earlier that week. It was still there, the letters still as clear as he'd made them.

 

He crouched down, shone the light on them. Breathed. His breath came out in streams of fog from his nose. Like cigarette smoke.

 

He extended the tip of one finger, rubbed against the edge of the M. The wood didn't splinter any further under his touch. It was smooth, soft, almost—kind—

 

Something fastened onto the back of his neck and slammed his face down into the floor.

 

Dean let out a shout, startled, and his gun went off in his hand against the wood, bullet streaking out across the board—his cheek was scraping against splinters and something had the heel of its palm pressed firmly against the knob of his spine, gripping the back of his skull so hard he could almost feel it bruising—and then there was a knee in the small of his back and a hissing, rasping noise in his ear, and the smell of rotting meat pushed into his face and made him gag—

 

Dean levered his gun against the floor and rolled with as much force as he could, throwing the ghost off—he pushed himself up onto his hip, aimed, fired at the crouched and gabbling thing against the opposite wall, and in the brief flash of the Maglite rolling away across the floor he saw its face.

 

Young, male, blue with suffocation. It let out a horrible choking scream as the rock salt burst it into ether and then it was gone.

 

Dean collapsed, groaning, the small of his back throbbing, his face burning. He reached up, touched it—it came away bloody, scraped to hell. He lay there, breathing hard, watching it cloud up and away, hand still wrapped around the gun in case the fucker tried to come at him again.

 

Wincing, Dean rolled to his knees a moment later, holding his face in one hand. He reached for the Maglite with the other, letting the gun drop momentarily to the floor, but it rolled a little further away, and when he finally got hold of it he happened to follow the line of its glow along the wood to where it rested.

 

He paused, looking down.

 

The gun had gone off in his hand when he'd fallen and the shell had torn across the wood, straight through Sam's name where it was carved in deep. The A and the M, obliterated.

 

Dean closed his eyes. His heart was tightening in his chest, painful and hard.

 

He left that place.

* * *

 

He took the backways home to Lisa's house, narrow roads without streetlights. He wasn't sure why. The bright lights of suburban streets seemed too insistent, too civilised, coming fresh from a place that reeked in his mind of how things had been once. Backways, then, where he could focus on the rise and rush of the black unlit asphalt and imagine, as long as he didn't look in the rear-view mirror, that Sam was sitting beside him.

 

Dean ground his lower lip with his teeth. Lisa had suggested this hunt would be closure, and for a while he'd agreed, but now—now that he'd seen his breath fog in the cold of a ghost for the first time in months, and felt the pounding of his gun into his shoulder, he was more tempted than ever to simply drive as far as these nowhere-roads would take him, go back to that solitary restless life, even without Sam, just to feel like himself again.

 

But that wasn't what Sam wanted. And he'd promised. However damning it was turning out to be, he'd promised.

 

Trees passed, stolid and unremarkable, lined up against the barriers on the road like soldiers awaiting orders, shadows watching him pass. There was nothing out here but their silhouettes against the purplish sky and whatever his headlights chose to snatch up into their range. He watched that, for a while, looked for potholes and rabbit carcasses and mailboxes and the flat gleam of a stray cat's eyes before it bounded away from his wheels. Radio turned off, the truck rattled along the road, tires hissing a little in snow-melt and mud. His headlights carved up the black and then threw it away again and it was almost hypnotic and he had a vague feeling something might happen if he didn't pay attention to where he was going—might slide off the road into a ditch, ram a tree, drive right past the neighbourhood and on and on until the sun rose and he was far away—

 

His headlights bounced up, suddenly, across someone standing on the side of the road—boots and long legs and a split second of a face, a hitchhiker in the dark, arm outstretched—

 

Dean screeched to a halt, tires spinning angrily against a patch of ice, his heart hammering into his throat, and he opened his door and stepped out onto the empty, endless road.

 

There was no one standing there when he looked back. Just the trees whispering in the night wind. The roadside was barren of anything but gravel.

 

“Hello?” he called, hoarsely, swallowing his heart back down. The truck was idling noisily, headlamps seething off pointed at nothing, and his breath fogging in whatever light they cast, and he was certain he'd seen someone—it wasn't something you _invented,_ someone out on a road like this.

 

Dean felt chill. He swallowed again, reached inside the cab of the truck for his Maglite, switched it on and took a few steps in the direction of where the hitchhiker had been. The light swept across grass and dirt and tree trunks. No one.

 

Not even a pair of footprints to disturb the gravel.

 

“Hello?” Dean called again, but there was no answer, and the roadside was still.

 

He stood there, shivering in his coat, in the middle of the road, the beam of the Maglite still trembling on the edge of the trees.

 

He _had_ seen a face. He _had._

 

Dean closed his eyes tight and took a deep breath, tried to orient himself in this wilderness, gripped the handle of the flashlight tight in his sore, freezing fingers. It couldn't have been, but he had to know, and there was no one—no one for miles—to see him if he tried, and to know if he failed, so he called again, in a big, breaking voice, “Sammy?”

 

He held his breath, heart pounding, waiting.

 

His truck rattled, settled in the cold. Wind burst against the trees and nothing moved on the side of the road or in the whole wide world and nothing, no one answered him.

 

Just the sound his voice had made, dying, dead, blowing back to him now in the cloud of his breath.

 

Dean switched off the Maglite, let his arm fall to his side. He stood there in the road for a long, long time.

 

Of course it hadn't been Sam. There had been no one there at all.

 

It would have been too simple, and too good.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Vina, Alabama_

_Summer 1998_

 

Dad set them up in a decrepit two-story on the outskirts of town where the weeds were as high as the front-room windows and the closest thing to civilisation was the Gas-n-Sip four miles down the road where Dean, by some miracle, had landed a part-time job. There was a well out back and two dry rooms with two dry beds and a refrigerator that mostly worked and a television that got three channels if they were lucky and four on the best of days. The shower ran though the water was hard-earned and took three days to come out clean, and there was a tire swing hanging from a perilous rope from the single tree out front. He set them up there with enough money to see them through until Dean could earn enough to keep them fed and then he left. Said he was heading up north for three months at the very least and that he'd be back in time to move them to a place with a decent school before Sam's sophomore year started. He told Dean, in private, that he had a good, solid lead on the Monster—capital M—Mom-killer—and that he couldn't pass it up. Couldn't risk them in such a dangerous field. So he left.

 

It was the summer of Sam's fifteenth year and he wasn't much bothered, being left behind with no one but Dean to offer authority. When Dad sat them down to go over his plans Sam mostly stared out the window at the grasshoppers thumping against the side of the house, and Dean knew instinctively—just by sitting next to him—that he was already thinking of how many directions he could wander away from this house, how many acres there were to explore that were all his for three months, how much he could do in a summer in a place like this.

 

 _Three months._ Dean couldn't even remember the last place they'd stayed for three months straight, or the last time he'd been able to make money doing something other than odd jobs. He was working some nights and most weekends at the gas station for the immigrant family who owned it and it didn't pay much but it would keep them fed, and that was all that mattered. He had to admit he wasn't much bothered, either. A summer with Sam, for all intents and purposes free—it was something he'd never had before.

 

Dad left them with half his arsenal, the Impala, and strict instructions to call the nearest ally if anything went wrong. He drove off a week into June, the tires of his truck sending up clouds of red dirt, while Sam and Dean stood, shoulders to either side of the door-frame, watching him disappear.

 

As soon as he was out of sight Sam let out a sigh of what might have been relief, and turned a grin up at Dean, and Dean smiled back, watched Sam slip back inside the dusky shadows of the house, hands in his back pockets, to explore it. He stood there, listening to Sam ramble around up and down the stairs, in and out of doors, feeling the evening fall quietly down around them, the sky going orange. It seemed as if this house was in an oasis of silence, as if—despite the holes in the roof and the proliferation of broken windows—nothing could disturb them here.

* * *

 

Their days in that house in Vina were long and rambling and directionless, and Dean loved them for that—there was none of the rushing and anxiety of piling into a car every few weeks to hit the road again, no schoolwork or research to trouble them.

 

He only left for the Gas-n-Sip and his cashier job alongside Alma, the owner's daughter, at six in the evening, and came back at eleven, by which time Sam was usually eating Spaghettios out of a plastic bowl and watching one of the three good-day channels in the dark, and they'd squish together onto the loveseat in the front room which was too small for two growing boys, and Sam would fall asleep there some nights, and other nights he would unfold his long, lanky body and yawn and tell Dean goodnight, and Dean would watch him wander to the back of the house, stretching, his sharp, tanned shoulder-blades sticking out from his bare back like bird's wings.

 

Sam was like a cat in this hot, crackling weather. Slept until noon and then went out wandering in the fields or in the spartan woods a mile over, down the road and back again; or else he went up onto the roof, precarious as it was, and lay out in the sun for hours in nothing but his shorts. His hair got long and the sun lightened its brown and dusted his nose with the smallest little freckles. Dean, for his part, was usually up as the sun was still making its way across the barren bleached floorboards, getting water from the well since the faucets rarely worked, polishing knives and organising guns, sitting out on the half-collapsed porch with a cigarette watching the morning roll in. He liked to be busy, liked to be quiet like this out here, in no hurry for anything. They were lazy and languid. Sometimes he followed Sam out into the fields, and sometimes Sam showed him things he'd found, like a collection of tiny baby-graves two miles out in the grass with no names to them but a few huddled wooden crosses weathered and bent stuck into the earth, or the pond in the opposite direction of the Gas-n-Sip, surrounded by thirsty trees and cool by their shade, too big to be an accidental watering hole and too small to be a lake. There was a dock there, a tiny thing, but no boats, and Sam claimed that though he went out there at the hottest parts of the day, no one was ever there.

 

On particularly muggy nights when no breeze came in through the busted windows to wash the stale air from the house, Sam came to work with Dean, loitered around inside the gas station where the air conditioning cooled the sweat on his shoulders. Alma—lovely and dark-eyed and brown-skinned and patient—let him organise racks of granola bars or wipe down counters in exchange for lollipops and butterscotch candies, and while Dean rang up customers he sat under the counter, long nut-brown legs sticking out across the tile floor at Dean's heels, sucking on Jolly Ranchers and reading books from the county library until the fluorescent lights had been burning for hours and it was time to go.

 

Often Dean wasn't sure where Sam was during the day, but the feeling he'd had when they'd first arrived here hadn't gone away—nothing had disturbed them and it didn't feel as if anything ever could. Vina was a small and tight-lipped town and the people in it didn't bother with them, if they knew they were there at all. Some nights he'd be getting ready to leave for work and the house would be still and silent and bereft of Sam, but it never occurred to him to worry. Sam was smart and tall and fifteen and after a month he knew this place and the world around it as well as he knew anything, and he was always there when Dean came back.

 

On weekends when he wasn't working the evenings he'd sit out front with a lukewarm beer and watch Sam idle in the tire swing, curled into its curve, reading by the light of the setting sun until fireflies settled on his hands and it was too dark to see.

 

They were golden days and June ended too soon for either of them. They were quiet with each other—never said much. But there was a kind of peace in that. Something good and real and solid that Dean felt in the deep parts of his chest on any given one of those glittering dusty mornings when he wandered into the back of the house and peered in to Sam's bedroom and saw him lying there, asleep, that old stuffed Dog of his still tucked as tightly into the crook of his neck as it had been when he was a baby, breathing the dusty dawn in his dreams, safe and sound.

* * *

 

Sam hit a growth spurt at the beginning of July and started sleeping naked in the heat.

 

At first Dean didn't know what to make of it. One morning Sam came out of his room bare as the day he was born and went down the hall, casual as anything, to take a shower, and Dean—having seen him from the kitchen—sat there with an eyebrow raised, trying to blink past what he'd seen.

 

The more he did it the more Dean thought that maybe Sam _wanted_ him to notice, to say something. Part of him assumed it was just childishness, Sam realising that no one was around to care and shedding his clothes to stay cool in the oppressive heat, but part of him was still stuck in a motel bathroom on the fourth of July and it remembered the look on Sam's face when he'd kissed him without thinking, and wondered.

 

He didn't say anything about it. Sometimes he wrinkled his nose and made a jab about _putting that thing away,_ but Sam never really responded. Just let a secret sort of smile pass over his face as briefly as the sun through leaves and went in to put clothes on.

 

Dean had suspicions. He'd had them for a few years now, ever since that incident in Oregon. Sam was smart, but sometimes he was embarrassingly transparent—looked at Dean sometimes when he thought Dean's attentions were elsewhere as if he wanted to devour him, stole Dean's secret porn stash but never mentioned being interested in getting any of his own, asked too many questions about the girls Dean was seeing—seemed a little too knowing whenever Dean was seeing boys behind the world's back, even when Dean was certain he couldn't possibly have found out.

 

And now this—this and the way Sam sprawled out on the couch some nights as if all he wanted was to be looked at in the blue glow of the TV; this and the way Sam—who'd loved Alma in June—now looked at her with bright jealous eyes, now that he had seen Dean kissing her behind the station one evening; this and the way he kept his bedroom door open as if hoping to be framed in its rectangle as he slept with the night on his bare skin; this and the way that Dean could hear him in the shower sometimes, never very subtle, apparently unaware of the thinness of the walls, whimpering short lean syllables to himself that sounded not unlike the call of Dean's name. He had suspicions, and he didn't know how he felt about them.

 

A phase, maybe. A passing pubescent phase. A confused teenage crush that would dissipate when they got back to school or when some familial disaster happened. Maybe.

 

Or maybe not.

 

He was fifteen. Too young by far even if Dean was inclined to do the kinds of things Sam seemed to think he wanted. As it stood, it didn't mean anything.

 

What confused Dean, though, he found—more than the nakedness or the lingering stares or the sounds Sam made through the walls—was how little it surprised him.

* * *

 

So maybe the skinny dipping was a bad idea. It seemed, to Dean, who was more than acute to the leanings of Sam's mind these days, to be little more than a ploy of some kind on Sam's part. But it was August, and Dad was due back soon, and the heat was stifling in that hotbox of a house, so Dean followed Sam down the vaguely-worn path to the pond in the trees one afternoon with two bath towels draped over his shoulders and his scrawny brother pushing through the weeds ahead of him.

 

“Dude,” Dean said, breathing the stale, twisted air as they neared the trees and Sam bolted into their shade like some forest creature magnetically pulled to its native habitat, “this pond better be fucking cold as ice or it ain't worth this hike.”

 

“It's cold, I swear, I checked this morning,” Sam called over his shoulder, vanishing behind the trees.

 

Dean ducked gratefully into their shade, leaned against a trunk to catch his breath.

 

The pond was still as death save a few ripples around the piles of the dock, and Sam was standing, bent forward, arms braced against his knees, looking out at the sun glimmering on its muddy surface.

 

“If I get some shit like cholera in there,” Dean said, taking in the colour of the water, the mosquitos dancing in the shallows, “I'm taking it out on you.”

 

“Don't be an ass, come on.” Sam took a few bouncing steps forward onto the dock and then bent to shimmy out of his shorts, and Dean carefully kept his eyes above his brother's waist when they came off.

 

Sam tossed his shorts back into the weeds and let out a whoop that echoed across the pond, and then he laughed, as if he'd done something grand—twisted to look back at Dean, all his nut-brown skin soft and cool in the shade, and the sun slicing across his face, those kaleidoscope eyes flattened and gleaming and all the freckles on his face standing out—

 

Fuck, his brother was beautiful. And joyful, and naked, and taking off down the dock, now, to fling himself into the water, and Dean bit back a grin. Goddammit.

 

He dropped the towels, pulled off his shorts, shouted “Cannonball!” just to see Sam panic and thrash away from the edge of the dock, and then he was in, too—a split second of the sun on his body and then the water, which was just as cold as Sam had promised and swallowed him up into perfect buoyant silence for the split second before he rushed back up to the air again.

 

He let out a whoop, heard Sam laugh somewhere past the water in his eyes. The stillness of the lake was shattered. When Dean rubbed his eyes clean he saw Sam bobbing a little ways away, trying fruitlessly to push himself up to float on his back, and saw both their bodies as the central points in the ripples shivering over the pond—something about that struck him. He wasn't sure why.

 

Sam gave up trying to float on his back, took a deep breath and slipped under the surface, and a minute later Dean felt a bump against his leg and Sam popped up, knocked his skull into Dean's chin and yelped and both of them exclaimed in pain before Dean gathered himself enough to dunk his brother's head under again, laughing a little breathlessly.

 

When Sam thrashed his way back up to the air again Dean let him go, pushed off a little, treaded a little looking up at the bright, hot sky. In the corner of his eye he saw Sam was doing the same, turning slow circles in place, face lifted into the sun.

 

As in all things here they didn't feel the need to talk. They must have done that for a good ten, fifteen minutes—just treading slowly in the shallows, watching the hot sky slip by over their heads.

 

In the trees around the pond cicadas were singing, and midges were dancing near the surface of the water, and everything was drenched in summer, if that were possible—Sam most of all, Dean thought, watching him paddle listlessly back and forth, his irises going pale under the light and drops of water on his face glimmering like dragonfly eyes—and maybe this had been a bad idea; _maybe_ Sam had only dragged him out here to satisfy his confused hormonal teenage urges to see his brother naked, whatever it meant; or maybe—maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe Sam just wanted to be a goddamn kid for an afternoon, before Dad came back and dragged them away from the peace of this place.

 

Sam bobbed back around and broke Dean out of his reverie, calling, “Race you over there?” pointing with his long skinny arm to the opposite shore of the lake, and Dean grinned.

 

He caught up to Sam halfway and grabbed his lanky shoulders and pushed him under the water, scrambled over his back, and by the time Sam made it to the shore, sputtering and scowling, Dean was lounging in the cattails, ankles crossed, smiling at the way Sam's hair flopped into his face like some overgrown puppy.

 

“Slowpoke,” he said, as Sam dropped down next to him in the mud, wiping water from his eyes.

 

Sam reached over to cuff him on the arm. “Cheater,” he said, trying and failing to hide his grin, and then they sat there for a while in quiet.

 

Eventually Sam lay down on his back, the better to let the sun dry him off, and sighed; a minute later Dean followed suit. Tried not to think of how they'd look if anyone stumbled on them here in the shade by this pond. Two naked kids a water's length away from their clothes and probably trespassing to boot.

 

“I wish Dad wasn't coming back,” Sam said, abruptly, and Dean blinked, turned his head on the wet grass.

 

“What?”

 

Sam's arms were spread up past his head and his face had gone dark and thoughtful.

 

“I said I wish Dad wasn't coming back,” he said, sighing again. He wiggled his toes and breathed and his belly went concave. “I wish we could just stay here.”

 

Dean felt a pinch in his gut and turned his face back to the tall wheeling sky.

 

“Well, we can't,” he said, as gently as possible. “You know we can't.”

 

“It's not fair,” Sam said, and Dean could hear the flatness in his voice that meant he was on the edge of getting worked up. “I don't get why _we_ have to keep leaving all the great places we find. Like—why doesn't Dad just leave us somewhere, or with somebody, so we can have normal lives? And do normal stuff like regular kids? He's gonna—” Sam gestured aimlessly, angrily with his hand, scaring away a clustering of midges. “He's just gonna drive up in a week or two and summer'll be over and then we'll be somewhere—I dunno, cold and rainy and boring for maybe a month. I wanna stay here.” Sam paused, swallowed. “I just wanna stay here with you. Like we've been. No Dad.” Sam frowned, plucked at a piece of grass until it shredded away in his fingers. “No—hunting.”

 

Dean closed his eyes. It never, ever, ever got easier to wrestle with Sam's disappointments, no matter how old he got.

 

“Sammy, what Dad does—it ain't just _hunting,_ man, it's—it's personal, you know?” He opened his eyes again, looked at Sam, tried to catch his gaze though it was averted firmly up at the sun. “It's about Mom, always has been. Our job's to listen to what he tells us and keep ourselves safe, and—someday, you know, we'll do what he does.”

 

“Yeah, but I don't _want_ that.” Sam sat up suddenly, jack-knifing his knees up to his chest, spine curving, looking stubbornly back across the pond. “Nobody _asked_ us if we wanted to be hunters.”

 

There was a lull in the cicada song. Clouds skidded by overheard like beetles on the surface of the water.

 

“Wish I was old enough to just leave,” Sam mumbled.

 

Dean felt the pinch in his gut again, stronger this time, pulled himself up a little on his elbows.

 

“Well, you're not,” he said, feeling strange, suddenly, as if a cloud had passed over the sun, or a chill wind blown on his bare skin.

 

Sam turned his head. “But you are,” he said. “Why are you still around? Don't you wanna do something else? Get out of all this stuff?”

 

“I—sure, Sam, yeah—”

 

“Then why don't you?” Sam snatched up a pebble from the dirt and hurled it into the pond.

 

“Because of you,” Dean said, though it came out as more of a snarl than he'd intended, and Sam froze as if he'd felt the sudden chill too—his shoulders came up and his back tensed tight. “Because you're my responsibility and I care about this family. Yeah?”

 

He felt angry, suddenly—angry that Sam was acting so bizarre these days, parading his skinny body around everywhere as if begging someone to take notice, fixating on this— _crush_ or _phase_ or _dream_ about Dean, whatever it was, whatever it meant, whoever it was making him—growing up way too fast into brand new skin and all these ideas about rebellion and futures that neither of them were going to get—angry that he couldn't share any of that with his little brother, was too far past the point of dreaming of better things, was too confused and too old to indulge Sam's feelings in the ways that he (maybe, secretly, deep deep down) wanted to—

 

“And skinny-dipping?” he said, or barked, “what the hell? You're _fifteen,_ Sam—”

 

Sam looked at him sharply like a startled animal. “What does that have to do with anything?”

 

Dean swallowed hard.

 

“Nothing.”

 

He stood up before he could say anything else. Walked off down the shore, around the line of the trees, back to where his shorts were lying in the mud on the other side of the pond.

 

His heart was rattling by the time he got back into the buzzing shade. He pulled on his clothes and started back towards the house, skin still wet, too afraid to look back should he see Sam's little nut-brown body curled up on the opposite shore.

 

Sam was fifteen and stupid and said reckless things and thought reckless thoughts and Dean didn't know what to do with him anymore, not really, didn't know what to do with the ways in which Sam made him think and the ideas Sam put into his head and it was better to just—let it go, he decided, let it go and hope it flamed itself out, this attraction Sam seemed to have to him and all the far-flung notions he had about the both of them and the life and the road and the future—

 

Dean dropped down onto the porch stoop as soon as he reached the house again, sweating, chest still bare and Sam's amulet hanging heavy around his neck.

 

He caught it up in one hand, breathed. Fuck.

 

When he shut his eyes he saw the jagged flash of colour that was the shape of the profile of Sam's face and he held it there in the space behind his eyes until it vanished.

* * *

 

Sam came home around evening, smelling when he passed into the hallway of sun and dried sweat, and he walked right past Dean into his room and closed the door.

 

It took a long time for Dean to gather the courage to go back there—by then the sun was setting over the dead golden fields—and when he cracked the door open, Sam was lying curled up on his bed, ratty old Dog nestled in the crook of his arm, picking at his lip with his thumbnail and watching the evening spread out on the windowsill.

 

“You okay?” Dean said, softly.

 

“Yeah.”

 

It wasn't very convincing.

 

Dean bit his lip, leaned into the room, came in a few awkward steps and stood there with his hands in his back pocket.

 

“Sorry I snapped at you,” he said finally.

 

Sam didn't move, didn't look at him.

 

“Yeah. Okay,” he said.

 

Dean knew what he had to say, knew it wouldn't help anything at all, but knew he had to say it—had to tow the family line. It was how he kept them safe.

 

“It's a phase, Sammy,” he said—tried not to look when Sam shut his eyes as if in deepest disappointment. “You—wanting to run off and stuff. You know. It sucks, I get it, you don't like—this—the way we live, I know, but you'll—you'll get used to it, Sammy, just like I did. You'll get it someday. It'll pass.”

 

They both knew he wasn't just talking about the life.

 

Dean moved back to the door, feeling heavy and sick, and when he got there he paused, twisted back, swallowed thickly.

 

“Love you, kiddo,” he said, though it came out raw and warped. “You know? All I want—”

 

_Is to keep you safe, make you happy, be what you want me to be. Not right now, Sammy, I can't be what you want me to be right now, but someday, maybe—when you're older—maybe I could—I wouldn't mind a bit—I know that now—_

 

But he felt awful enough already. Those were things you didn't say. Kept his mouth shut.

 

“Yeah,” Sam said softly, curling into himself a little, pulling Dog closer. “Can you shut the door?”

 

There were tears on his lashes when Dean did as he asked. That, more than anything, hurt like hell.

* * *

 

When Dad—despite all Sam's wishing and hoping—came back, they didn't linger long enough to really say goodbye to the house and the fields and the pond, or to Alma's family at the gas station. The truck pulled up on the dirt drive and within fifteen minutes Sam and Dean were zipping up their duffel bags and checking under bedsteads for loose socks and practically ready to go.

 

Sam was silent as the grave; didn't even bother to really greet their father, though Dean couldn't say he'd been inclined to, either. No sooner had the truck appeared on the horizon than he'd felt a pang of anger, struck, suddenly, with exactly what Sam had said at the lake—that now, at this moment, more than anything, he wanted to stay here with Sam, to stop moving for once in his life. But it was too late to do anything about it by then.

 

“Let's go, let's go,” Dad called from the front hall, clapping his hands once or twice obnoxiously, and Dean—dropping his bag on the kitchen table where the breakfast dishes were still laid out—took one last trip into the back of the house to be sure he hadn't left anything behind.

 

Sam's bedroom was door was only open a crack, but Dean caught movement from behind it and paused. He tipped the door wider with his knuckle, silently, peered inside.

 

Sam was standing at the busted window, his back to Dean, and for the brief moment that Dean watched him there he thought it was the saddest thing he'd ever seen: Sam's awkward teenage body, his broadening shoulders, his skinny back, every part of him pulled down with exhaustion and sorrow in a way Sam was too smart to show when he knew he was being watched—he was doing something at the windowsill, but Dean couldn't see what, and he stood there, still as the pond on those hot days, for a long time, hardly even fidgeting even when Dad called “Let's go, boys,” again from the front hall.

 

It felt like something splitting in the heat when Sam finally sighed, and turned slowly on his heel towards the bed; Dean ducked back into the dim shadows of the hall, unwilling to be seen.

 

When Sam came out a moment later, bag slung over his shoulder, his other arm dangling down and seeming surprisingly empty, Dean glanced back into the room over his shoulder.

 

Sam's Dog was sitting in the corner of the windowsill, ragged face pointed outward toward the road even with its one eye missing. It sagged there in the nest of cobweb and dust, sad and small and alone, the late afternoon light catching on its finer fibres and pooling in its remaining plastic eye like a candle flame, or a tear.

 

Dean swallowed hard—heard the trunk of the Impala opening, what seemed very far away.

 

He thought about going in and grabbing it, hiding it away in his own duffel, because surely Sam didn't _really_ want to leave it behind—surely they'd be two states over and Sam would start protesting that he'd forgotten something—

 

But he'd been standing there, arranging that Dog so carefully in the crevice of the wood. Like a gift left at a roadside shrine.

 

He could feel his eyes getting hot and had to slip back away, had to stop looking at it, acutely aware that he wasn't meant to see it, that it was something Sam had done for himself. Sam who was sitting in the passenger seat of the Impala waiting for Dean to slide onto the bench beside him and start up the car and take him away from the best summer of their lives. Who was fifteen and, Dean supposed, thought he was getting too old for things like Dog.

 

It took all he had to walk out the door and not go back for it. _No,_ he wanted to say, _I've watched you fall asleep with that thing in the crook of your arm since you were a baby, it's part of you. You won't be the same without it—_ older, sharper, less innocent. More like Dean.

 

Not a kid anymore; never a kid again.

 

“You okay?” Sam asked, softly, when Dean slammed the door of the car shut after him and felt down for the ignition. Dean knew his face was probably splotchy and red and that even if it weren't, Sam could feel his sadness from a mile away, but he just cleared his throat and turned the key.

 

“Yeah,” he lied.

 

They followed Dad down the drive and Sam watched the house disappear in the wing mirror of the Impala, and Dean couldn't bring himself to look at him until they'd crossed state lines and the moon was hanging heavy overhead and Vina was gone—not even a speck on the horizon splaying out behind them.


	11. XI

_Minersville, Utah_ - _Flagstaff, Arizona_

_October 1999_

 

Sam was gone for a week and five days before he managed to piece it all together.

 

Dean had never been so panicked in his life. He thought about it a lot, as he was frantically tearing their motel room apart looking for any clue as to where his little brother might be headed. Tried to imagine the last time Sam had sent him into such a frenzy of anxiety. Fort Douglas, probably. That shtriga, and that hadn't even been Sam's fault.

 

This time it was most certainly his fault. Sam vanished into thin air twelve days ago, and Dad was due back in two, and Dean had no idea what to do.

 

He'd taken clothes and his backpack and his knives, at least, so Dean could rule out kidnapping; on the morning when he woke to find Sam gone the salt lines were unbroken save for the gentlest nudge of the motel door opening, so he could rule out something supernatural spiriting him away. But beyond that he had nothing—no way of contacting him or tracking him down, no clue where he could have gone, no surefire way to contact Dad, and even if he'd had that, it was strictly a last resort. Dad was upstate but he'd be back soon and Dean was beginning to wear himself out with fretting and searching and trying to piece together where his little brother had gone.

 

He turned Sam's bags inside out fifteen or sixteen times, looking through every last bit of crumpled paper, every notebook, every paperback for a hint as to where he was headed; he sat down with a pen and paper and listed everything Sam had taken with him, trying to decide how far he could have gotten, but even that wasn't good enough, because there were a thousand different directions he could have taken off in, a thousand different ways to be out of Dean's reach within a day, let alone a week and five.

 

Dean called every contact in the Four Corners area and even tried a few on the western edges of Texas and Oklahoma but none of them had seen Sam or heard from Sam or knew anything about where he was. Dean scoured every restaurant and Gas-n-Sip and hole-in-the-wall for fifty miles up and down I-15 with Sam's sophomore yearbook photo clutched in his hands, asking everyone who would listen if they'd seen him hitchhiking, if he'd stopped for a soda, if he'd been anywhere, anywhere at all—but the people shook their heads, frowned in sympathy, turned their eyes away from him or wished him luck in finding the kid, suggested putting out an Amber Alert, suggested everything but anything that was helpful.

 

In Parowan he caught a glimpse of himself in the red, reflective metal of some farmer's dusty old Ford pickup and even in the harsh near-desert light he could see how pale and harried he looked. Like something out of a Dust Bowl documentary—not a twenty-year-old man.

 

In between the flutters of his worry he swore Sam's name like a curse word under his breath, turning their bags inside out for the millionth time.

 

It occurred to him more than once that Sam might be dead. Picked up on the side of the road like one of those unfortunates in a horror film who end up hitchhiking with a serial killer, bones left to bleach in the desert sun. He pushed that down as best he could; it never helped, when hunting things that stole their victims away, to imagine the victims as being dead; imagining them alive was what kept you going, gave you the push the find the thing.

 

Sam was alive, and he was going to find him, and then he was going to open the biggest can of whoop-ass on that boy that he'd ever seen.

 

A week and five days after Sam vanished Dean finally had the presence of mind to dig the old road atlas out of the Impala's glove compartment and finally, finally he found his clue—he searched every map for unfamiliar marks or dog-ears until he found one: the route from I-15 down to Flagstaff, Arizona was highlighted in Sam's favourite orange highlighter, and they'd never had reason to trace the route to Flagstaff before.

 

An hour later he was roaring down I-15 headed for UT-17, the sun going down out the passenger window, melting warm in the dense white sky.

* * *

 

The Autolodge Flagstaff had one light on in the entrance and Dean idled on the curb, watching it, running his fingers anxiously over the steering wheel.

 

It was well past midnight. He'd been to every motel he could find on this side of Flagstaff that offered rates low enough that Sam could pay them with his measly cash allowance. Even that was a long-shot, though, Dean thought—there was no telling where he was, what he was doing here, if he was even in a motel at all. But none felt right—none felt like Sam.

 

He'd been checking almost every alleyway and underpass for him, too, sick to his stomach with the thought that maybe Sam was sleeping on the streets, that maybe his stupid reckless idea to run off had gone badly and he was lost somewhere in this city with little money and no food—

 

Dean swallowed hard, rubbed his eyes. No. Sam was smart, and Sam was resourceful, and he was tall enough now to pass for eighteen, and there was no way he'd pass up a chance to use that to his advantage and get a room somewhere, and this Autolodge—though it didn't look any more promising than the last six motels—was cheap, no-questions-asked, and just like a hundred other motels they'd stayed in as kids.

 

Familiar and affordable. He had to at least look.

 

Dean pulled in to an empty spot and ducked his head when he went in to the front desk, where the single light was burning and a large, wrinkled woman in her sixties was playing solitaire on the yellowed counter-top. The low-slung lobby smelled sharply of bleach and age and everything was the same old, mildewed shade of brown.

 

The woman looked up, adjusted her glasses when he came inside.

 

“Can I help you?” she asked, in a tired voice as dry as the Arizona highway. She didn't look too pleased to have an unshaven harrowed-looking young man in her office at one in the morning, and Dean suspected that the subtle movement of her hand down beneath the desk was to reach for a gun in case she was being robbed.

 

But he didn't have time to play nice or allay her fears—in a few hours it'd be a week and six days and Dad would be back the next, if not sooner, and he had to get in and get out if nothing was here for him. He had to know if Sam was here, if he'd stood in this angry-smelling lobby and rented out one of those shitty rooms.

 

“Hi,” he said, lamely, approaching the desk too fast for the old woman, who scooted her chair back cautiously the closer he came. “Um. I got—separated from a friend of mine and he said to meet back here, but I forgot his room number—”

 

She blinked; she didn't seem convinced. Her name tag said _Rhonda._

 

“I can't give out room numbers to just anybody,” she said bluntly. “'Specially not at one in the morning.”

 

Dean felt his heart sink and shutter, and paused for just a minute before reaching back to dig his wallet out of his pocket. Rhonda watched him with heavy-lidded blue-shadowed eyes.

 

He dropped a crumpled twenty on the counter in front of her.

 

“Please,” he said, painfully aware of how hard he was breathing, how desperate and dangerous he probably looked, but dammit, this was _Sam—_

 

Rhonda made a gravelly noise in her throat and hesitated for a minute before she reached up with pink lacquered nails and slid the twenty off the counter and under it.

 

She grunted, stood up wearily, moved towards the register behind the desk. “Name?” she said over her shoulder.

 

Dean closed his eyes. Shit. He hadn't thought about what alias Sam might use. He wouldn't have used his real name—Dad had ground it into their heads a long time ago that their names were private and rarely to be used with strangers—but there were a dozen names he could have used, and if he threw out the wrong one she'd think he was up to something nasty—

 

“James Taylor,” he blurted out, before he could even stop to think about it, and immediately he bit his tongue, hoping it was the right one by some miracle.

 

Sam loved that stupid song these days. _Fire and Rain._ Played it all the goddamn time, crackling out of the headphones of his Walkman. It stood to reason he might use Taylor's name—it was the kind of thing he'd do—

 

Rhonda ran her pink lacquered fingernail down the register, turned a page, and Dean bit his tongue harder, heart bumping in his chest.

 

“James Taylor. Room 15,” she said, finally, and turned around and waddled back to her chair and sat back down to her solitaire, and Dean thought he might cry right there with relief.

* * *

 

It was too dark to find the room that night.

 

Dean pulled the Impala across the lot, waited until Rhonda vanished behind the window of the front desk to turn her off and stretch out across the back seat. He could see the block where Room 15 would be if he nudged his head up the window, and somehow—despite how strange it felt to think that Sam was just across the lot, probably thinking how clever he was for getting away, or dreaming deep all alone, unaware of how close Dean was—somehow, he managed to fall asleep.

* * *

 

The sun was what woke him, sliding across his eyelids in shades of orange and red.

 

What made him come awake was the blurry movement across the lot when he opened his eyes.

 

Dean sat up, rubbed the sleep from them with his knuckles, and leaned forward.

 

A door had opened across the way—it was too distant to read the number punched in brass onto the wood, but it wasn't too distant to recognise the tall, skinny figure coming out into the cool morning.

 

Sam stood in the doorway a minute, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and his boxers, and Dean wasn't sure what he was waiting for until something else came out of the room. A dog, golden, long-haired, its tail low but wagging contentedly.

 

“He got a fucking dog,” Dean murmured under his breath.

 

Sam looked okay, even from this distance, and Dean felt his shoulders relaxing when that became apparent. He wasn't hurt, wasn't beaten, wasn't malnourished or high—in fact, he looked like he almost belonged here, padding barefoot alongside the dog down the pavement after he turned the key in the door of Room 15. He looked for all the world like a longtime resident who knew how to breathe this city's air, knew his way, and Dean almost hoped—as Sam disappeared behind a column and reappeared closer to the lobby, looked to be making for the sidewalk along the road—that he wouldn't turn his head and see the Impala in the lot.

 

Dean was going to have to drag him back to Minersville, but he looked—well, happy. He was walking with a straight back and an easy gait and he looked happy.

 

And Dean was angry, _furious,_ that he'd put him through all this, but he didn't want to burst that bubble just yet.

 

He watched Sam vanish around the corner of the Autolodge, following the dog. He wasn't going to go far in his bare feet and his underwear like that. He'd come back soon enough.

 

Dean sat there a while, gathering himself, rubbing exhaustion from his eyes, thinking about how this was going to work.

 

Finally he popped the door of the Impala and felt for his lockpick in his jacket pocket.

 

When Sam came back, he'd be here.

* * *

 

Room 15 was a mess when he broke in. The coffee table in front of the couch was covered in pizza boxes, all of them cold and empty and stained in rings at the bottom with grease; one corner of the couch was stuffed full of empty Funyun bags, and the windowsill was lined with soda bottles behind the ugly yellowish curtains. When Dean swiped his hand across the coverlet of the bed it came away reddish with dog hair. He wrinkled his nose.

 

The room smelled of pizza dough and dog and boy, and a few of Sam's shorts were draped across the back of an armchair. His duffel bag was open on the floor and shirts scattered all around.

 

Out of vague curiosity Dean lifted up the pillow that was dented with the imprint of Sam's head. One of his knives was underneath, laid neatly next to a glossy new hardly-touched copy of _Sports Illustrated._

 

“Really?” Dean mumbled, picking it up. Sam liked soccer, and that was about it, and the guy on the cover was clearly suited up for football. He was good-looking, though, Dean thought. Slim, high cheekbones and freckles, dusty short-cropped hair, bright green eyes—

 

Oh.

 

Dean dropped the magazine back on the mattress and wiped his fingers on his jeans. He had a feeling he knew what Sam was doing with _that._

 

“Jesus.”

 

He stood there in the half-dark, the door still open an infinitesimal crack, sunlight streaming in through the dust, surrounded by Sam's mess. Postcards on the walls.

 

Quietly, he picked his way across the minefield of Sam's discarded boxers to close the door, and then he cleared the armchair of Sam's clothes and settled into it.

 

A clock ticked away somewhere.

* * *

 

A half-hour later the door to the motel clicked open and the big golden dog padded in, took a sharp left and went right up to Dean, still sitting in the chair. Dean pulled his legs back a little, frowning at it, and a moment later Sam's shadow entered into the light and right into the room.

 

He closed the door, scuffed off his feet on the carpet, apparently oblivious to Dean's presence. Then he stopped—put his feet down—pulled a little at the hem of his T-shirt.

 

“How'd you find me?” he said, looking at the curtains. Not at him.

 

“Well, Sammy,” Dean said, sitting up a little, “I'm a hunter. _Finding_ is kind of what I do.”

 

Then Sam looked at him—turned those sharp, fox-like hazel eyes on him, flashing in the barest glare of the sun, and Dean felt pinned like a goddamn butterfly, just like every other time. But he took a deep breath despite the needle in his chest, stood up.

 

“Get your shit,” he said, firmly. “We're leaving.”

 

Sam blinked at him, face impassive. He didn't move; maybe he couldn't. Dean wasn't sure. At this point, he couldn't afford to care.

 

“Sam,” he said, sighing, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose, “don't fight me about this, just get your clothes and let's go. Please.”

 

“What about my dog?” Sam said, flatly. The dog came to him as if it could recognise its species in the cadence of his voice; it rubbed up against his leg and he reached down, almost involuntarily, to scratch at the fur behind its ears.

 

Dean felt a sharp twist of frustration. “You don't have a dog,” he snapped, “that's a stray, and it's staying here.”

 

Sam still didn't move. He stood there, stroking the dog's delicate silky ears with his long slim fingers.

 

He didn't seem upset, or even surprised. Mostly he just looked resigned, Dean thought, and he didn't know what to make of that, was increasingly finding it difficult to know what to make of Sam at all.

 

“Get your shit,” he said again, harder, flinty, feeling hot and angry in his hands and gut. “And meet me in the car. _Now._ ”

 

This time Sam went-to, slowly leaving the dog in the middle of the room. He brushed past Dean, picked up his duffel, started gathering armfuls of clothes from the floor to shove inside. His face was carefully, precisely blank.

 

Dean left, leaving the door swinging open behind him. The Arizona sun was high, high and throbbing overhead.

* * *

 

Dean drove them out of Flagstaff, back up to US-89N, Sam sitting cold and far away in the passenger seat, quietly watching the scenery blur by.

 

They were an hour out of Cameron before Dean spoke.

 

“Why the hell would you do something like that, Sam?” he said.

 

Sam said nothing, but he turned his face back from the window, looked down at the floor between his knees.

 

Dean shook his head, finding his down-turned eyes in the rear-view mirror. All his anger was collecting like a bad taste in his throat.

 

“I thought you were dead,” he said, hoarsely. “For a while. You know that? Do you know how hard I looked for you up there? How many people I called asking if they'd seen you?”

 

“Does Dad know?” Sam asked, very softly.

 

“No,” Dean said, “and if we make it back up to Minersville tonight he won't have to. But that's not my point.”

 

Sam swallowed, thinned his lips out into that quiet line he had sometimes. His listening line, Dean called it, privately. Sam only ever made that face for him. Only respected him enough to shut up and hear.

 

“That? Taking off in the middle of the night—hell if I know how you even got _down_ there—”

 

“Hitchhiked,” Sam said quietly.

 

“ _Whatever_ you did—that was reckless, it was stupid, it was irresponsible, it was _selfish,_ Sam. I mean, do you get that?”

 

Sam didn't say anything. His lower lip trembled a moment in the rear-view mirror but then it settled and Dean pressed on, turning his eyes back to the rise of the road in front of him, bleached white in the afternoon light.

 

“You're always telling me about how you wanna get away and all that stuff, and I get it, I do, but—this ain't Vina, Sam, you're sixteen, you're old enough now to get yourself in real trouble with these ideas you get in your head. You could have gotten yourself killed and we'd never have known where you were, do you see that? I mean, I've barely slept, I've been so freaked—that's not _fair,_ dude, it's just not.”

 

Silence fell, save for the rumble of the car beneath them.

 

They passed a turn-off out into the desert, a pale line carved into the sand and the rocky crags, disappearing into the plateaus. Vultures circled somewhere far out there.

 

“I'm sorry,” Sam said, so low Dean almost couldn't hear over the sound of the road. Sam didn't lift his head. He kept staring down into the footwell like some guilty penitent on the confessional kneeler. “I didn't—I didn't mean to make you worry.”

 

“Sure seemed like it.”

 

“I didn't,” Sam protested, voice going steely. He worked his jaw a minute, the nerve ticking at the hinge of his throat. “I didn't leave to freak you out.”

 

“Then why?” Dean laughed, a mirthless scoffing noise. “What the hell did you think you were gonna do? Live in that shit-hole Autolodge the rest of your life?”

 

Sam went quiet again, looked out the window again. His knee was jarring up and down the way it did when he was holding something back.

 

Dean looked at him in the mirror, past the glare of the sun.

 

“Sam,” he said, a little gentler.

 

“What.”

 

“Why'd you do that, then?”

 

Sam shrugged. Not sullenly—almost sadly, as if he were disappointed in himself somehow.

 

“Huh?” Dean watched him a still moment longer and then sighed; he couldn't keep anger in his veins too long when it came to Sam, and especially not when he was low like this, so he leaned sideways to gently shove against his shoulder. “Come on. Why?”

 

Sam sighed, settling forward in the seat; he rubbed the palm of his hand against his face, twitched his shoulders.

 

“I wanted to see if I could do it,” he said.

 

Dean blinked. A set of tourist-trap stalls whisked by them on the side of the road. The mountains and plateaus were baking in the sun. “Do what?”

 

He felt Sam's eyes turn on him, bore into him with their strange, delicate fire, and he kept his own firmly on the road, almost afraid to meet them.

 

“Get away.”

 

“Yeah, I figured that—”

 

“Get away from you.”

 

He didn't mean to pull off the road—it kind of happened on its own, as if the Impala herself were startled by those words. A minute later a cloud of dust was falling away from the windshield and they were stopped, idling, rocking a little on the desert wind.

 

Dean looked Sam up and down—his melancholy sloping body in the seat, hands fiddling together in his lap, eyes averted once again in shame.

 

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he said. “Get away from—”

 

“That came out wrong,” Sam said, apologetically, wincing a little.

 

“No, seriously, Sam, what does that mean? What did I—”

 

“Nothing! Nothing.”

 

“Well, then what the hell—”

 

“You said it was a phase,” Sam said, too loud, over him, and then shut his mouth like a steel trap, and Dean felt his own shutting too.

 

He felt cold, suddenly, though the air outside was warm for autumn in the wastes. Felt as though something creeping, some uninvited passenger, had moved forward in the back seat and was hanging over the front, intruding on the space between them though it had been there, really, all along—

 

“What?” Dean said, feebly, because he already knew.

 

Sam shook his head, smiled, looked out past the windshield to the endless highway stretching out.

 

“You said it was a phase,” he said again, his voice cracking now, tortured with a total lack of humour. “In Vina.”

 

“The wanting to get away, yeah, I did—”

 

“You know what I'm talking about,” Sam said. He put his elbow up on the edge of the door, rested his head on his knuckles. He looked old, suddenly, old and very tired. When he sighed his whole body seemed to collapse. “You knew back then, too. You just never said it out loud.”

 

“What are you talking about?” But he _knew,_ he _knew;_ but he had to ask. Dean had the terrible feeling of having stumbled into a conversation he'd been expecting but hadn't even remotely prepared for.

 

“I wanted to see if I could do it,” Sam said. “Get away, make it on my own for a while. I was gonna come back,” he said, as if that somehow made it better, “I was gonna come back, I was gonna try three weeks and then come back—I just had to see if I could do it.”

 

“What? Do what, Sam—”

 

“If I could _be—_ if I could be without you,” Sam said. His eyes looked wet. His voice was as broken-up now as the wrinkles in the plateaus past his head.

 

“Why the hell would that matter?”

 

The questions were coming out now without any thought behind them. Dean felt completely turned-around, tramping down the only path he saw because it was the only path there was.

 

“Do I seriously have to spell it out for you?” Sam asked. He was looking so hard at the horizon Dean thought it might burst into pieces.

 

“Sam,” Dean said.

 

It seemed to be enough.

 

“Your freak little brother's in love with you,” Sam said, all at once. He turned his heavy head to him, a sad, awful half-smile on his lips. “Happy?”


	12. XII

_Somewhere on US-89 N, Arizona_

_October 1999_

 

It _wasn't_ a surprise. That was what made it so hard.

 

If it had been—if it had come out of left field, say, or like a blitz attack in his blind spot—if it had been, he would have been able to react. He would have been able to sputter something incredulous or brush it off or say something in the moment but the fact was that it _wasn't_ a surprise, and therefore it had the unfortunate effect of leaving him voiceless.

 

Sam was looking at him, waiting. He didn't seem expectant. His breathing was normal. He just had that look of resignation to him, still, the one he'd been wearing since they left Flagstaff, as if he'd admitted something he'd long ago given up all hope on. How it was received no longer mattered to him. It just _was._ Sitting between them on the bench seat. The uninvited passenger.

 

He had to say something. But though he _had_ known—he'd known since well before Vina, really; he'd known since that thoughtless kiss on the fourth of July what Sam felt, he'd known it in his bones the way he knew everything else in the world about Sam—he'd never managed to decide what it meant, what it made him, when every time he thought about it he felt the curling in his gut that meant he felt the same way too, on some level, whether it was the same way Sam experienced it or not— _love—_ no different than the love he'd had for him since Sam was three days old in that baby carrier on the way home to Lawrence, just a little bigger, a little more intent—he didn't know what to say. He had no earthly idea.

 

Sam looked away from him again, tapped his foot once or twice on the floor. He broke the silence like a gunshot.

 

“Doesn't matter, though,” he said, gaze pushed now against the dashboard in his line of sight. “I did it.”

 

“Did what?” Dean's tongue felt like sandpaper in his mouth.

 

“Got away from you,” Sam said, his voice thick and sad, and his smile got bigger and his eyes got wetter and his smile got sadder, too, though he didn't cry, and hardly moved. “Two weeks away from you. I did it. I didn't think I could.”

 

Sam pulled at his nose, swiped the back of his hand beneath it, blinked slowly at the dashboard in front of him.

 

“I'm gonna leave as soon as I can,” he said, “now that I know I can do it. And I'll be—” He gestured, absently. “You know. Out of sight, out of mind, or whatever.” He cast his smile briefly on Dean and it stung like a slap. “It's good, right? Few more years, you won't have to deal with your freak little brother and his—freaky little feelings—”

 

“Stop it,” Dean said, letting out a long, shaky breath. He felt all tight, all tense, all pins and needles inside, prickly and uncertain and wavering. Like staring into a mirage. “Stop calling yourself that. You're not a freak.”

 

Sam didn't say anything to that. After a long moment he gently lowered his face into his hands and sat there like that. Elbows on his knees, spine bowed forward, shivery and silent.

 

Dean had to look away. He looked out the driver's side window at the scrub brush, the plateaus, the crags and cracks in them, the circles of vultures and the endless, bleached, eternal wastes—he thought, vaguely, that he should turn off the car or they'd start wasting gas, idling here—

 

“I get it,” he said, voice cracking like the brittle earth beneath their wheels. “Sam, I get it—how you feel—”

 

Sam raised his head, almost imperceptibly, but didn't dare look at him. Dean's throat was cold where Sam's eyes weren't focused, for once.

 

He considered, for half an instant, telling him everything. Spilling it all. How, ever since he'd figured it out, Sam's strange little crush on him—full-blown love, now, he supposed, the kind that lived in lips and hands and bodies and beds—how he'd tried to be put off by it, how he'd tried to rationalise it as something he would never, ever reciprocate—they were _brothers,_ and Sam four years younger—he'd tried so, so hard not to feel his own self growing in that direction, too—reaching up, like a plant rising out towards the sun, the fierce, hot love, admiration, _adoration_ he felt for his sweet, strange, peculiar little brother, bleeding and blending into the glow of what Sam felt, mingling like coloured inks in water—how he'd thought about Sam's eighteenth birthday and how he'd imagined kissing him then, like something out of some goddamn rom-com, the Perfect Moment—how he'd never, not even once, felt repulsed by it, even though he knew it was wrong, it was bad, and if Dad ever knew he'd skin him alive, skin them both alive for being sick, perverse, ungodly—how he didn't _care_ about _any_ of that, and never had—

 

He considered it.

 

Dean pulled back onto the road in silence. Slid onto UT-59 N in silence. Back into Utah as the sun was just beginning to slip down out of the sky.

 

He didn't say any of that.

 

Sam looked out the window all the way, watching the light bleed out of the ground. Green government signs standing to attention and falling back. His mouth was pressed against his hand as if he thought that would hide the dreadful trembling of his lips. His face was turned as if he thought that would disguise the glimmer of sadness in his eyes.

 

He'd confessed that incredible secret and Dean hadn't said what he should have said and Dean could almost picture the way it was going to go, laid out on the highway as it came up under them—Sam dwelling in that, feeling unwanted, thinking himself repulsive, feeling _looked at_ and _judged_ under Dean's every passing glance, and he would grow into that all crooked and sad, and he would leave, one day, thinking he was doing Dean a favour, and it wasn't too late to tell him— _it wasn't too late_ —but Dean didn't have those kinds of words, and he was sick at heart, and Utah was going dark around them and he was so, so tired, and so heavy with frustration, that he simply didn't know how to say anything to the withering boy in his passenger seat.

 

“Sammy,” he said, licking his dry, wind-chapped lips, but the desert was far behind them, and it _was_ too late.

 

There was nothing after. Only night.

* * *

 

_Minersville, Utah_

 

Dad's truck was there when they pulled into the motel lot.

 

The sight of its bumper gleaming in the Impala's headlights banished the unwanted passenger from the car as quickly as it had come, and immediately there was nothing in the car with them but stale fear and solidarity, all thoughts of everything else shelved away.

 

“Shit,” Dean breathed, slowing to a stop behind the truck.

 

Sam's eyes were wide beside him.

 

“I thought you said he wouldn't be back until tomorrow,” he breathed, sounding paralysed.

 

“He wasn't supposed to be.”

 

“He's gonna kill us,” Sam whispered. “He's gonna kill us.”

 

The door to their room was closed. They were idling in the lot in the middle of the asphalt and Dean didn't know what to do—he hadn't planned on this—he'd been going to keep it a secret, like that time in Maine, like all the other times Sam had wandered off and come back unharmed—

 

“What are we gonna do?” Sam said, grabbing briefly at Dean's sleeve.

 

“We can't just sit here,” Dean said, staring at the door. Sam wasn't wrong—Dad was going to be pissed as all Hell, but Dean had a feeling he wasn't going to turn his anger on Sam.

 

“He's gonna kill us,” Sam said, picking anxiously at his lip.

 

Slowly, Dean pulled into the space beside the truck and turned the key in the ignition. The Impala settled on her wheels. They sat there, quietly afraid, for a long time.

 

“Come on,” Dean said, shakily, finally, opening his door. Sam followed, hands jittering like a nervous white birds, and winced at the noise his door made when he closed it behind him.

* * *

 

There was only one lamp on inside the room, and somehow that made walking in worse—at first glance Dean couldn't tell where their father was, and when he managed to catch his shape in the half-dark it startled him. It must have startled Sam, too, because he bumped against Dean's back like a frightened baby deer, and then went still as stone.

 

The faint glow from the open door fell across their father's face and seeing him in the light didn't do much to improve Dean's hopes. He looked mountainous and furious—the worst kind of fury, too, the kind that bubbled under the surface and burst in hot violent waves—and Dean instinctively shifted, covering Sam's entire body with his own.

 

He was confused; he was tired; his head was still spinning from what he'd heard in the car today and how he felt about it; a great part of him was angry at Sam for more reasons than simply running off; but no way in Hell was he going to let that kid get the brunt of the fury.

 

“Boys,” said Dad, his voice like flint striking stone. He gestured stiffly to the mess of the room that Dean had left behind, unthinking, as he'd torn south to Arizona. “Which one of you would like to explain why, when I came back this morning, I found this—and neither of you?”

 

He was addressing them both but he was looking at Dean, directly into his face, and Dean looked right back. He wasn't scared, he discovered abruptly. On seeing the truck, he had been, but now he wasn't—now he saw Dad between him and his well-deserved bed, and the prospect of a lengthy and bruising lecture looming behind Dad's head, and he knew he wasn't getting to rest any time soon. That—was just unfair.

 

“I ran away,” Sam said meekly, behind him, and Dean countered, “Be quiet, Sammy,” before the words had scarcely left his mouth, and Sam obeyed.

 

“You ran away,” Dad repeated, finally turning his eyes down at his youngest, or at the space where his youngest was hiding. Then his gaze shifted back up to Dean like pistons locking into place. “And Dean let you.”

 

“Don't get mad at Dean—” Sam began, voice already too loud and nearing the edge of trouble, but this time it was Dad who cut him off.

 

“How long was he gone?” he said, and it wasn't that he was shouting—it was just that his voice had grown, like a pit bull's hackles rising, and it was filling up the room in a way no other man's voice could. Dean felt incredibly small, shielding Sam like this, even though he still had a good four inches on his brother. He set his shoulders back. “And how did you let this happen?”

 

“Two weeks,” Dean said, surprised how strong his voice was.

 

“It's not Dean's fault,” Sam said, weakly. “I snuck out—”

 

“Sammy,” Dean said, and Sam shut his mouth again. Defending himself was all well and good, Dean thought, but the more Sam ran his mouth the closer he'd get to setting Dad off and Dean had made up his mind two minutes ago that Dad wasn't laying a finger on Sam tonight and he intended to see that through.

 

“You both realise this is unacceptable,” Dad said. His eyes were full of fire even though his voice held steady.

 

“If you're gonna punish somebody, punish me,” Dean said, before he could stop himself, and he felt Sam grab hold of the back of his shirt out of some fearful reflex. But he wasn't scared, and he wished he could twist his head and smile down at Sam and make him see that. _Don't worry, kiddo, he can't do nothin' to me. Can't do nothin' to me that'll hurt worse than what I did to you today—_ “Yeah, he slipped out on my watch. So it's my fault. Punish me, but don't you touch him.”

 

“Dean!” Sam said, a weird, sharp, broken sound, like glass shattering, and his fist tightened in Dean's shirt. He wheeled around him, face all cut up in the strange light.

 

“No, Sammy, it's fine,” Dean said. He kept Dad's gaze. “Why don't you go on outside for a minute.”

 

“It's not your _fault!_ ” Sam shouted, eyes lighting up. He whipped his head around to Dad. “It's _not his fault,_ ” he said again, with the venom of his hate in it, this time. It made gooseflesh shudder up Dean's spine, hearing that. “It's not _fair.”_

 

“I shouldn't come home from a job where I put my ass on the line to save people's lives only to have to worry about the whereabouts of my good-for-nothing sons,” Dad said, his voice the size of the whole entire room by now. “ _That_ isn't fair. Listen to your brother and get out of this room.”

 

“Go on, Sammy,” Dean said. He could feel himself rooting the floor as if his feet were made of marble. He wasn't scared at all, not of this big shadow-man, this big coward-of-a-mountain man. He was fed up—with driving, with looking, with listening, with trying to stand on his tip-toes to meet Dad's bullshit standards, with trying to rationalise the way they were treated. If Dad wanted to break his nose over this minor slip-up so fucking be it, Dean thought. It wouldn't make him any bigger.

 

Sam obeyed, though Dean could feel him shivering with rage all the way outside, and when the door closed it was just him and the coward.

 

“Sammy's right,” Dean said, after a long time. His voice felt like ice in his throat, exhilarating and sharp in equal measure. “It's not my fault. I'm not the one who ran off.”

 

“Then you should call him back in here. Let him get what's his.”

 

Dean felt as if he were looking at the room from very far back inside his head. He laughed, unsure where it was coming from. “No.”

 

“You let him get out,” Dad said. Dean couldn't even see his mouth moving in the dark. “What had you so preoccupied that you let your brother walk right out of this room for two weeks to—”

 

“Flagstaff,” Dean said, flat, “and I was sleeping.”

 

“I don't like your tone.”

 

“ _Sir,”_ Dean added, biting it out.

 

Dad bristled, and then refocused, but Dean could see the fury boiling up, and he was glad the door was shut, that Sam was on the other side of it. It was going to break soon.

 

“Sam is your responsibility, and youfailed to keep him safe—”

 

“Yeah, and _I'm_ the one who busted my ass looking for him,” Dean said—no—his voice was getting bigger too; he could feel it in his mouth, pressing up against his teeth, just as big as Dad's. _Wow,_ he thought, vaguely, in the back of his skull. _I didn't know it could do that._ “And _I'm_ the one who found him. Because I know him. I know what he wants, and how he thinks. Which is more than I can say for _you—_ you're not exactly guardian of the year, you know—” Bigger, bigger, and it felt damn good rolling out of him, God, why hadn't he tried this sooner, the way he'd seen Sam do, the way he'd seen Sammy standing up—“taking off and leaving us all the time? For _weeks_ at a time, Dad, _months,_ chasing whatever the fuck it is you're always chasing, hunting monsters, which is great for us, isn't it? Leaving us alone and unprotected? Pushing us around from place to place with zero explanations—yeah, him running off? It was selfish, it was stupid, but he's a sixteen-year-old kid and I can't blame him for wanting to get out from under _you.”_ Dean stepped back, realising he hadn't meant to move forward, took a deep breath. “At least he's got the balls to try. I sure as hell didn't.”

 

If this were a cartoon, Dean thought, Dad's ears would have been billowing steam by now—but as it were, he was just standing there, big-shouldered and simmering under the surface and Dean could almost feel the first blow coming—it was right there between Dad's knuckles, tightening up, getting ready to pull taut and back.

 

“And you know what?” Dean said, unable to resist the bait, “he's safe, isn't he? Because _I_ found him. Because _I_ gave a shit. He's fine. No thanks to you. _Sir._ ”

 

He'd walked into the room expecting to get smacked around. When Dad was this kind of angry, it was inevitable. It wasn't a surprise when it came—knuckles to cheekbone, and his skull slamming into the wall beside the door, rattling the cheap picture frame hanging there. Dean felt it way back in his head, saw his vision going wild, saw his body righting itself again, arms raised up in stupid, childlike provocation.

 

“Was this what you were gonna do to Sam? Huh? You gonna punch a sixteen-year-old kid in the face?”

 

The second fist hurt more—the second fist smashed his face into the door, unforgiving wood against flesh and bone—the third fist rammed his head back into the wall and he felt his nose breaking in agonising detail and blood running into his mouth.

 

“Aw, come on,” he said, laughing through the sticky copper taste on his teeth, out of breath, head ringing, feeling busted and proud, “come on—come on, you _—”_

 

That earned him the floor—Dad's boot in his gut, and something satisfying about that, somehow—Dad's boot in his _face,_ and that was just cruel—

 

—and then merciful stars behind his eyes. A cold, kind blackout.

 

The beating of his body falling back into his head like the distant _tha-thump_ of his heart.

* * *

 

He didn't so much come to as he came into the pain. Hot, bright points of hurt that opened their eyes before he did—ribs, stomach, face. Colours were swirling behind his eyes like fairground banners or fireworks, popping and buzzing and sizzling.

 

He was aware, vaguely, that he was lying down. Whatever was underneath his hands was scratchy but soft. Blankets. Once the noise of his heartbeat and the blood in his ears calmed down he could hear the _cree_ and rattle of night bugs, and the hush of air against the metal window-frame—open window, past dark, and his right side was a little colder than his left.

 

When Dean finally opened his eyes—difficult, as his right eye seemed more inclined to stay shut—he saw the motel ceiling, ugly orange-ish stucco, the ceiling fan turned off. There was a dip in the bed next to him. He turned his head towards it.

 

“Are you okay?” said a small, shivery voice, and when Dean's eyes cleared it turned out to be Sam, sitting stiffly on the very edge of the mattress as if poised to spring into action at any given moment.

 

Dean swallowed, thickly—felt a nasty glob of what was probably blood sliding down and tried his hardest not to retch it back up. His jaw felt swollen, but he managed to cough a little, and smile with at least one corner of his mouth.

 

“Yeah,” he said, though it was fairly apparent he wasn't okay at all.

 

He sat up, slowly, despite Sam's jumpy noises of protest, and curled forward a little, reaching up to touch his busted nose. That was when he saw the bottles of whiskey and peroxide on the nightstand, and a little mountain of damp cotton balls spilling out of the old plastic first aid kit they kept in the glove box of the Impala.

 

There were butterfly bandages across the break on the bridge of his nose when he felt it, and several more on his cheek, and one above his eyebrow. The insides of his lips still tasted of dried blood but the corners of his mouth were clean.

 

It hurt to turn his head, but he did. Sam gave him an apologetic shrug. His face looked tight and dry, like he'd been crying, and he pulled it away from Dean's gaze before it could rest there too long.

 

“Patched me up?” Dean said, though it came out more like _pathed me ub,_ and he felt a sharp little sting from a cut on the tip of his tongue. His head was pounding from the effort of sitting up so he laid it on his knees, nursing his swollen jaw with the palm of his hand.

 

Sam sniffed, cleared his throat. “Yeah. Uh.” He reached across to gather the cotton balls up in fistfuls, bounced off the bed to go throw them away. “You should probably lay down again. For a while.”

 

“How long was I—”

 

“'S past midnight,” Sam said, from behind the partition by the sink. Even through the fog in his head Dean could hear the desperate control in Sam's voice, the one he got when he was trying very hard to keep calm.

 

They'd gotten in around seven. The red numbers on the clock read 12:48. Nearly six hours out.

 

Sam came back, holding a plastic bag of ice and a towel, and held both of them out to Dean with his eyes pushed down. Dean took them, looked down at his chest and his stomach—Sam must have gotten his shirt off somehow; bruises were flowering all across his ribs in purples and reds, the biggest one just beneath his heart, in the vague shape of—well, something—Dean was sure they'd come up with a joke about it in the next few days, about how it looked like Georgia or something.

 

He looked up at Sam, and Sam looked at the bruises, and they were quiet for a while.

 

“Dad took off,” Sam said softly, finally. “I don't think he's coming back tonight.”

 

 _Good,_ Dean thought. He had half a mind to shoot their father in the face on sight right about now.

 

“You okay?” he said.

 

Sam's face flushed and he looked down and Dean could see a few hot tears hovering in the corners of his eyes.

 

“I'm sorry,” he said, meek and little, and pushed his hands behind his back, shoulders going tight. “It's all my fault.”

 

“Hey—”

 

“No, it is, it is,” Sam said, reaching up to scrub at his face. He turned abruptly, grabbed up the bottle of peroxide and a cotton ball, his arms and shoulders and fingers shaking. “Let me—just—”

 

He crouched down while Dean sat there, still not quite upright, and touched the cotton to a split of busted skin on Dean's rib, and Dean started when it stung.

 

“Sammy—”

 

“It's all my fault,” Sam said, defiantly, his face all scrunched up and wet. “He wouldn't have—done this if I hadn't—”

 

“You don't have to—Sammy, listen.” He tried to grab Sam's wrist away but Sam batted his hand off and kept at it, dabbing the cotton ball across the broken flesh.

 

“No, Dean, shut up, just let me—”

 

“Sam.”

 

“Let me _fix_ it—”

 

“Stop,” Dean said, more firmly this time, and he dropped the ice and the towel on the bed and snatched up Sam's hands, pushed them away. “Stop it.” Sam let go of the cotton ball and Dean reached out and grabbed him up and pulled him in tight, ignoring how much it hurt to have Sam's skinny body pressed against the bruises and his broken nose pushed into Sam's shoulder—just held him, felt his hair against his cheek, his open hands hovering in the air behind him.

 

Sam let out a noise and put his hands flat on Dean's back, crumpled and shook, and Dean's hand found its way up to the back of Sam's head and held it gently against his shoulder—that was all he could do.

 

“I hate him so much,” Sam said, or sobbed, one of his hands curling up as if to beat against Dean's back. “I hate him so much.”

 

“Look, no,” Dean said, pulling back a little, though Sam still clutched onto him. “I ran my mouth at him, I deserved it.”

 

“That's bullshit,” Sam snapped, and he was right, it was bullshit, but there were so many confused emotions ricocheting around them all today that hate just felt like an unwanted guest and Dean just wanted peace, so he shook his head, smoothed down the back of Sam's hair, held him while he shivered his anger out.

 

Nearly one o'clock and Sam had sat up all that time while he was out, Dean thought—cleaning blood off his mouth and disinfecting the places Dad's boots had broken his skin, setting his nose and putting ice in plastic bags—and after everything Dean had done to him that day, too, after he'd sat in that car and listened to Sam spill his heart and then smashed all his little hopes with a goddamn hammer—there was no doubt in his mind that he'd missed his chance to say something, to let Sam know that he wasn't a freak for the way he felt. He'd passed it on the highway somewhere in the desert and it wasn't going to find him again here. But even after all that, Sam had done this—Sam thought it was his fault, what Dad had done, and had sat here trying so hard to fix it, probably thinking all the while that when Dean woke up he'd never look at him the same way again, would never be able to see past the unacceptability of what Sam felt about him—

 

He was so lucky, Dean thought, to have this kid for a brother: petulant and irrational and ill-tempered and reckless but fundamentally so kind and selfless, so compassionate, heart three times too big for his sixteen-year-old body—he was so lucky to have this kid looking out for him in this shit-hole Utah town and everywhere else besides.

 

So Sam was in love with him; so what? At the end of the day there was this, and they were brothers, still, and nothing was different, even though _everything_ was, and he'd fucked it up that morning in the car but he had to believe there would be another day, another right moment to put Sam back together again. Love him back in all the myriad ways that he was loved.

 

“Dean?” Sam asked, and Dean landed back in the room with the open window and pulled out of Sam's grip to look at him.

 

“Yeah.”

 

Sam looked down at his feet, ran the palm of his hand up and down his cheeks to dry them.

 

“Are we good?” he said. “I mean. After.” He gestured aimlessly with his hand, and Dean knew he meant their conversation in the car, and he sighed.

 

“Yeah, Sammy,” he said, smiling with the good half of his mouth, the side of his lip that wasn't split, and he hoped Sam could feel the meaning in his voice and would know that it was true. “We're fine, kiddo. I swear.”

 

Sam met his eyes for just a split second after that, and then turned away—gathered up the bottles and the first aid kit and went to put them in their places.

 

He wasn't shaking anymore, Dean saw, as he picked up the towel and lay back down, holding the ice against the big bruise on his chest. That, out of everything else that had happened today, was one good thing.


	13. XIII

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

Cicero Cemetery wasn't the most private of graveyards. No gates, no walls, acres of open air above, and the one road passing by, flanked on the opposite side by mobile homes and telephone poles. Back in the days of better hunting, in the days of Sam, it was the kind of place they'd have sworn under their breath to see—the absolute worst kind of place for a salt-and-burn.

 

Dean parked on Timberlane, far away from that empty suspicious roadside.

 

It was nearing midnight. Folded up under his leg on the driver's seat of his truck were two pieces of white computer paper from the library—one, the obituary of Daniel Harwick of 428 Caplin Street, with a grainy photo of the dead man's face above the minute text—the same face that had attacked him in that attic. The second was a map of the cemetery plots. Harwick's circled in red pen.

 

There was a shovel in the truck bed, a half-gallon of gasoline and a bag of road salt beside it, and matchboxes in his jacket pocket. All he had to do was walk down Timberlane, right through the curved little ornamental walls, to the lonely patch of grass that covered up the wifebeater's remains. Dig it up, dump the salt and gas and light it. A good half-hour's work and the Okoro house would breathe easy, and he'd be done.

 

Dean sat there a while, idling, thinking about it.

 

He'd always imagined that his last hunt—well, his and _Sam's_ last hunt—would be the thing that would kill them; something massive and monstrous that was way above their pay-grade that would end them, together. After all the things they'd seen and all the ways they'd died it had become almost a fantasy: going down swinging, shooting and struggling, back to back or something equally cheesy. He'd thought, and he couldn't imagine a better way to die than like that. On the job, and not alone.

 

But Sam's last hunt had been in Blue Earth, destroying the Whore of Babylon—that had been the last real job they'd worked, before everything ended. It had been kind of uncanny, going back to that town, knowing how often they'd been there before to stay with Pastor Jim as kids, to return and find it all so damaged and destroyed.

 

There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, Dean thought, about the way their lives had gone.

 

 _That_ had been Sam's last hunt, and this was Dean's. A run-of-the-mill ghost with no real power. He couldn't decide if it was anti-climactic or poetic. It'd be over in less than an hour, and then he'd go home to Lisa, who was waiting up for him with a glass of wine, and it'd be done. That whole book of his life closed up and shelved forever.

 

Dean clenched his fist against his knee, watching his breath steam up the windshield. He felt heavy in his seat.

 

He wondered what would happen if he just sat here and never got out, never finished the job, never went home, because the prospect of _this—_ this felt like dying, like killing a part of himself. He was afraid, deep down against his spine, of what else might die if he walked into that graveyard.

 

His ability to remember, maybe.

 

Dean sat there for a long time, only moving to turn off the engine and sit in the settling chill. He could see the curve of the road off towards the cemetery but not the graves themselves.

 

A light came on in the house at his left, the kind that would let someone nosy peer through blinds, and Dean sighed. He couldn't sit here all night. Someone would call the cops on the suspicious vehicle lurking on their street.

 

He turned the key and drove a little ways up the road, headlights off, until he was out of sight of the houses, covered a little by the trees, and then mechanically he got out of the truck.

 

It was a cold, damp February night, and he'd neglected to bring gloves. His fingers, curled around the shaft of his spade, went numb before he was halfway down the street.

* * *

 

Harwick was just where the gravediggers had left him—a tiny, weathered headstone bearing just his name and the two dates. No _Loving Father,_ no _Devoted Husband,_ not even a _R.I.P._ The wife and kid apparently didn't think he deserved them. Dean had to agree.

 

He let his flashlight rest on a nearby grave-marker while he dug. The ground was hard and cold from the winter and more than once Dean had to crouch down to pull a stone out of the way of his spade. It wasn't the nicest grave he'd ever seen. There wasn't any love in it. It was numb and neutral and Dean had to admit it kind of felt appropriate—detached. This job didn't care about him any more than he cared about it. When it was done it would be done—no loose ends, no guilt, no reward, just the underwritten _fin_ at the end of the book.

 

His shovel hit pine four and a half feet down. They hadn't even thought he was worthy of the full six.

 

The coffin broke open under the heel of his boot, and Daniel Harwick's bony dead face, eyeless and cold, stared up at him from between the busted slats, caught only in the vague edge of Dean's flashlight.

 

Dean didn't waste time dwelling on its empty sockets. He hauled himself up out of the hole, looked carefully around for anything passing by on the road up ahead or anyone lurking in the shadowy copse of trees behind the plot, but everything was quiet and foggy and nothing stirred. The stars, where they shone through the clouds, were pinpoints of brightness, soft and unassuming.

 

“Right,” Dean murmured to himself. “Let's get this done.”

 

He tried not to think of how utterly alone he was. How no one but him and Harwick's corpse could hear his voice.

 

He emptied the whole half-gallon of gasoline onto the ruins of the coffin—it would feel nice, he decided, to burn up a wifebeater extra-crispy—and shook the bag of road salt nice and even over the glistening wet bones. Then he took a step back, fumbled the matchbook out of his pocket—looked at it for a while.

 

This was the last step, besides replacing the dirt once the body smoked out. The last matches he'd ever light to kill a ghost, the last time he'd ever strain his back digging up a grave, the last time he'd ever smell the distinct, sharp, oily combination of salt and fire.

 

There was nothing keeping him from doing it except the fear of what doing it meant.

 

He probably stood there longer than was strictly safe. He had his back to the road and anyone could have seen him hovering out there, snuck up on him and caught him, but he didn't particularly care.

 

Fifteen, twenty minutes he must have stood, looking down into the grave, as if hoping that the longer he drew it out the easier it would be to let all of this go.

 

He blinked, shuddered upright. Struck the matches and dropped them in before he could hesitate anymore.

 

Harwick lit up like a Christmas tree, in a plume of flame, and Dean stepped back to rest against a tall standing headstone and watch him burn.

 

Lisa had told him this was closure, and he'd tried to believe her. But he didn't feel anything, watching the fire lick up the insides of Harwick's shallow grave, watching smoke catch the night wind and dissipate into the trees. He felt exactly the same—cold and lonely, and the back of his throat full to bursting with his ghosts, and all the rest of him as empty as the sky and its bleeding stars.

* * *

 

It was well past one in the morning by the time the body stopped smoking and the grave was refilled, and Dean stood there for a long time, leaning on his dirty spade, hands completely white with cold.

 

He wondered if Lisa was still waiting for him, or if she'd given up and gone to bed. She knew where he was—she'd kissed him on his way out the door—she was probably nodding off on the couch. It wasn't fair to keep her up. Besides, there was nothing else here for him.

 

He was straightening, lifting his shovel over his shoulder, when something moved into the corner of his eye and he froze, looking straight ahead.

 

His heart leapt up— _fuck._ Someone had probably seen the glow of the fire and called the cops or whoever managed the cemetery. Just what he needed. Dean licked his lips, trying to remember the layout of this place, the best direction in which to bolt if he'd been seen—

 

Whatever or whoever it was didn't move, though. It remained, stationary, just inside one of those ornamental walls at the entrance to the graveyard, like a thin grey column.

 

Slowly, Dean crouched, letting his shovel lie back down on the ground, and then slowly he straightened again, took a careful step backward, to shift the thing into a better sight-line. Maybe it hadn't spotted him—it was dark enough over here, now that the fire was out—

 

He froze, and his heart froze, and he felt all the breath go out of him in one swooping blow.

 

There was no mistaking that figure by the wall.

 

Dean felt his mouth go dry; he closed his eyes, carefully, and swallowed hard. Even in the blurry uncertainty of his peripheral vision he knew that stance, the way shadows touched that face, watching him. And it was impossible, but there had been that vision on the road, just the night before—and if there was ever a moment in time for a miracle, this would be it—

 

“Sam,” he whispered, like a magic word, and turned his head—just to see, just to be sure, before he let his heart get too high up in his throat—

 

The face of the wall took the moonlight across it like a slash of paint with nothing to disturb it, and the tall grass pulled back and forth in the chill night wind. Empty as death.

 

Dean sank down against the grave marker, letting its edge bump against the bottom of his skull. His breath was coming warm and fast, heart jumping with unfulfilled adrenaline and something cold sinking into his stomach like a stone.

 

He swallowed again, his face growing hot and prickly, and when he spoke his voice was thick and contorted.

 

“Cas?” he rasped out, desperately, before he could think better of it—he covered his face briefly with his frozen trembling hands and then thrust them down, staring hard at the place where Sam had been, as if by looking at it with enough intent he'd crawl out of the stonework again—he'd _been_ there—either he'd been there or Dean was losing his goddamn mind. “Cas, come on, I need to talk to you, man—please—”

 

The _please_ was hardly out of his mouth before the frigid air swept over Dean's head in a sudden gale of wings and there were footsteps in the frozen grass behind him. “Dean?”

 

Dean breathed, watching the wall through the steam that rose from his mouth, his eyelids wet. He could feel his lower lashes curling as they froze.

 

“Do you see him?” he asked. “Do you see him anywhere?”

 

“See who?” Cas' voice was taut and concerned up above his head, and Dean closed his eyes tight for a moment, trying to hold back the urge to scream.

 

“Tell me you see him,” he said, or whispered—it came out of him all sideways and flat, like sheet ice.

 

“Dean,” Cas said, very softly.

 

Dean wasn't sure how he managed to stand up—his legs felt like brittle sticks underneath him. He pulled at his mouth with his stiff white fingers, daring, now, to let his eyes slip away from the point on the wall where Sam had been standing, scouring the road that ran past the graveyard, but there was nothing. Nothing taller than the marble angels bending over the plots.

 

“What's wrong?” Cas asked, and Dean could only stand to look at him for a split second. That fretful line was carved between the angel's brows and it made Dean sick. “Why are you out here like this?”

 

“I saw him, Cas— _right over there,”_ Dean snapped, head full of fog, pointing viciously at the wall. “I saw him, and I saw him last night on the side of the road—”

 

“Who?”

 

“ _Sam,_ Cas, I saw Sam, standing there, watching me, I _saw—_ ”

 

He broke off, arm falling back to his side, closed his eyes. He tried to draw a calming breath but it only made it halfway down his throat before it came back up, hard and hurt.

 

“Dean,” Cas said gently, “there's no one here but you and me.”

 

“Then I'm losing my fucking mind.”

 

He managed to look at him, then, and Cas just looked right back.

 

The angel looked battleworn and weary, Dean thought, past the pounding in his head. Harrowed. His vessel looked smaller, skinnier, if that were even possible. Skin strapped tight over bone.

 

“You're still remembering,” Cas said, a statement more than a question.

 

Dean laughed, bitterly, and sank back against the headstone. He felt as if all the blood had gone out of him, abruptly and immediately. There was no one by the wall; his heartbeat was coming down slow and relentless.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“It's getting worse.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Cas shifted uncomfortably in the dead grass. Dean could feel his eyes digging into him, looking past his skin and his face to whatever was going on inside it all.

 

“You saw Sam,” he said.

 

Dean nodded.

 

“I don't think I have to tell you that that's impossible.”

 

“No. You don't.”

 

Cas was silent. Dean couldn't see him, but he assumed he was doing the angel equivalent of anxiously gnawing at his lower lip.

 

He wanted to go home. He didn't want to go home. He didn't know how to move. There was no point.

 

“Why did you call me down here?” Cas asked, cautiously.

 

“I don't know.” Dean ducked his head. He could tell his face was wet, though he couldn't remember actually starting to cry. He felt exhausted, suddenly, and weighty, as if someone had filled him full of stones. _I didn't want to be alone out here,_ he thought, but he didn't say it. Cas probably heard it anyway, inside his head.

 

Slowly Cas came around the headstone and leaned against it beside him, shoulder to shoulder. Even though the temperature was steadily dropping the longer the night wore on he was warm, and he was present, and Dean thought of the long drive back to the Braeden house alone in the dark and felt wretched.

 

“Cas,” Dean said, after a long time of quiet in the chill. He saw Cas turn his head in his peripheral vision. His eyes were full of ice and moon.

 

“Yes?”

 

Dean swallowed thickly, sighed long. Every part of him was aching for rest.

 

“Do you think—is there any way you could, um—repress it? These things I keep seeing, you know. Remembering.”

 

He closed his eyes.

 

Cas shifted next to him, a rustle of his coat.

 

“I think that would be very unwise,” he said.

 

In the black spaces behind his eyes Dean thought of Utah and Flagstaff and the bruise on his chest shaped like Georgia and the way his nose was still crooked even after all these years, and—like a taste on the tip of his tongue—he thought of what had come after—the nebulous chronology that he knew was just waiting for him in some vulnerable moment, and he'd fall into it and drown in it. The most painful years of his life, of their lives—

 

“I don't know if I can do this, Cas,” he said, opening his eyes to the star-choked sky. The wind was icy on his face, brushing it red. “The way things are going—shit's coming that I have never, ever wanted to relive—wouldn't it be better?” When he turned to look at Cas, the angel was still looking at him, the usual harsh angles of his face softened, his gaze no longer probing but pulled back at a respectful distance. “Wouldn't it be better if I just couldn't remember this stuff at all?”

 

Cas shook his head. “You don't know what you're asking,” he said, standing upright, walking a few steps forward into the frost.

 

“This ain't living,” Dean choked out, “what I'm doing. This isn't how it's supposed to be.”

 

“You're asking me to help you forget your brother,” Cas said, turning back to him. “You don't want that, not really, and even if you did I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do that to you.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because it wouldn't heal you, not in the way you think,” Cas said. “It's not a solution. It'd only make the hole inside you bigger, and I won't do that to you.”

 

Dean looked down at the graveyard dirt between his feet, the scuff-marks on his boots, the mud on his jeans.

 

They stood there a long time, unmoving and silent, and Dean wondered how late it was, now. Hoped Lisa had gone to bed. He wanted to be able to climb in next to her, warm his hands beneath her pillows, settle to sleep inside the rhythm of her breathing, wake up next to her and feel safe, and know that she would turn over in the morning and smile at him and love him. He wanted to go home and get lost in her the way he sometimes did. Right now more than anything he wanted her arms around him and her optimism and her kindness bumping against her ribcage like a songbird. He felt lost and childlike and awful and broken and broken and broken.

 

“Drive back with me?” he asked, voice cracked, and hefted his spade over his shoulder and started to walk without waiting for an answer.

 

“Of course,” Cas said, already muffled by the late wind.

 

Dean didn't look back at him as he picked his way over the headstones and across the road, but when he got to the truck Cas was there at the passenger side, and he sat beside him in silence all the way back to Lisa's house.

 

Dean let the truck come down in the drive, and when he turned to thank Cas or wish him goodbye, the seat was empty.

 

The lights were off in the house. The joints of his knuckles ached with the work he had done. He was alone again.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_2000_

 

Sam got quiet again.

 

He left junior year behind and his seventeenth birthday, too. Sped through the hot, relentless summer in the passenger seat of the Impala while Dad's truck kicked up dust against their windshield where they followed behind him. He started his last year of high school late, fresh off the tail end of a whirlwind chase after a harpy in Louisiana. By the time November rolled around Dean reckoned that he'd heard less of Sam's voice in the last year than he ever had before, including the months they spent in Liza Greyman's house as children, and Sam had taken up his mutism as a toddler.

 

He didn't talk to Dad, and hardly ever talked to Dean. Sometimes Dean saw him leaving the front steps of the high-school-du-jour, smiling and nodding along with the people he'd managed to gather as friends, but his mouth closed up like a lock clicking in as soon as his long legs folded into the Impala's front seat.

 

It wasn't a silent treatment, or something he was doing out of spite, Dean was sure—he knew Sam's spite, and it didn't feel like this. It was internal quiet, concentrated quiet, both a barrier and a refuge at once; Sam didn't want to be disturbed in his thoughts, and he seemed to be carrying a lot of thoughts.

 

And it was a sad quiet. Dean didn't know much about depression, but he wondered. The longer they pushed on away from what had happened in Flagstaff the deeper Sam seemed to sink into himself—couldn't sleep, shrugged away food, couldn't even laugh at the sitcoms they watched to lull them to rest. When they went out for target practise Sam was just as good with a pistol as he'd ever been, but no matter how many times the bullets hit the bullseye he never showed a flicker of pride, even when Dean smacked his shoulders and nodded his approval. He was going through the motions, Dean thought—cleaning his knives, hunching over his research at night, serving silently and obediently as back-up whenever Dad needed them, but there wasn't any passion in him anymore, no get-up-and-go, and Sam had never been a fan of the life to begin with, but now his hatred for it seemed to be the only thing that lit the fire behind his eyes.

 

Dean knew it wasn't just about Flagstaff. Sam hadn't mentioned it again since, and even with its bigness he wasn't one to sulk about something for a straight year. Flagstaff was part of it—Dean could see that, in the sad, lingering looks he sometimes caught Sam giving him, in the way Sam tried to keep his relationships at school a closely-guarded secret, as if he were ashamed of hiding away in them—but it wasn't all. Sam was shrinking up, away from Dad's bottles and Dad's violent hands, from jobs and books of lore, from any attempt Dean made to try and make him feel included, like a part of the family. Sam didn't _want_ to be part of the family. Or at least he didn't want to be a part of what the family did.

 

It was hard to forget what he'd said a year before—that he was going to leave, now that he knew it could be done; and every morning Dean woke up expecting the bed to be cold and empty next to him, the door left open a crack, and Sam vanished into thin air, never to be seen again, never to come back again.

 

Waiting for it to happen was almost worse.

* * *

 

The year was marked out in monsters: January into February, a string of skinwalker kills up the West Coast. March, a demigod and his mate split up near Chisholm, Minnesota, and Sam and Dean tracked it for weeks while Dad went after the goddess—they would have frozen to death in the bitter winter cold when the Impala broke down on the highway had Sam not thought to bring blankets, and they huddled together for warmth in the back seat until help came, numb white arms laced through one another.

 

April and May saw Dad scattering a coven in Montana while Sam finished out the school year and Dean dated Callie, whose family owned the local run-down drive-in, and Dean felt unimaginable guilt when Sam caught her leaving the house they were living in, hair sex-wild and lipstick smeared—he disappeared that night and Dean found him down a few streets, sitting atop the monkey bars at the neighbourhood playground. He didn't say anything when he came down, and Dean didn't say anything either. He could have said _she didn't mean anything_ or _I'm just waiting, Sammy, I'm waiting until the time is right_ but the first wasn't true and the second sounded like a lie.

 

(And they both knew that Sam's birthday had come and gone, that here, now, there would be no harm done if the right time turned out to be then—right there, on the sidewalk back to the house—and Dean thought about it all the way, Sam walking just behind him, the stars coming out overhead, thought about walking up the front stairs and kissing him in the doorway and leaving a little of Callie's bubblegum-pink lipstick on his mouth, thought about smiling at him and saying how he'd been waiting to do that for a year or more, just like every shitty Harlequin novel ever said it should be done—but they reached the porch that night and Dean felt himself swallowing his tongue, watching Sam go into the dark front hall alone and unkissed.

 

He didn't know what he was waiting for anymore. He didn't know if he was scared of what would happen, or scared that he'd misread the entire situation, or if he was only tricking himself into thinking he felt about Sam what Sam felt about him—so ultimately he dropped back into neutral gear, skidding helplessly on the icy road, hoping for a neon sign in the sky to tell him when to push forward again.

 

Pathetic.)

 

June, July, August, hunt after hunt after gritty, pointless, frustrating hunt, most on the opposite side of the state from Dad. Sam tanned in the sun; Dean didn't. Freckles came out in force on Dean's face, and the guy he took home one night in the dog days, only when he was certain Sam wouldn't know, told him he thought they were the prettiest things he'd ever seen. The guy looked a little like Sam, Dean thought, after he'd gone the next morning. He'd had the same straight white teeth, and Dean had smiled and told him _they_ were the prettiest things _he'd_ ever seen, and that had been a lie.

 

September was a stormy blur, picked out by the _absence_ of hunts, rather than their profusion. He and Dad interviewed witnesses and sorted through newspapers while Sam stepped into his senior year, tentative and mute. October was much the same, and November, too.

 

Sam came home at the beginning of December—they were living out of a Super 8 in a suburb outside of Denver—with a flyer tucked into the outside pocket of his backpack that Dean picked up, after Sam had gone into the bathroom for a shower.

 

 _College: The Application Process,_ it read, in big thick white letters.

 

Dean was surprised to find that he didn't feel angry when he saw it. Neither angry nor sad nor hurt. Just—empty; expectant.

 

He put it back where it had been. He didn't say anything to Sam. After all, it had only ever been a matter of time.

* * *

 

_Mokelumne Hill, California_

_February 2001_

 

“Dean.”

 

“Mm.”

 

“Dean. Wake up.”

 

“Mm?”

 

“I burst my stitches.”

 

It was pitch-dark when Dean opened his eyes and reached out sideways for the lamp on the nightstand, fingers searching blindly past the bottles of whiskey and peroxide crowded up close on it. When he finally fumbled it on the bulb burst against his eyes in a shock of white and then settled, buzzing, back into the atmosphere of late, late night, and Sam was hovering next to the bed, shirt rucked up over his hand, holding his side with bloody fingers.

 

Dean sat up, woozy with sleep, blinked at him.

 

“How the hell'd you do that?”

 

Sam shrugged, wincing. “Slept on them wrong.”

 

“Sit down,” Dean said, yawning, waving his hand in Sam's general direction. His brother was hazy but he obeyed, sitting down on the edge of the bed while Dean rolled out to find the first-aid kit in the mess of their clothes and bags on the floor between the steads.

 

They were in a second-floor motel room in a town that could hardly even claim to call itself one, and if they'd calculated correctly on the way down here from Montana last week, this was the furthest they had ever been away from Dad, who was in the Catskills for the next month, as far as they knew. He'd given them a laundry list of leads and here they were—hunting as real partners for the first time, and getting plenty torn up for their trouble.

 

Something nasty had been tormenting a few ranch families nearby and they'd only just cleaned it all up tonight, but Sam had taken a gouging claw to the abdomen and Dean had probably gotten a concussion falling out of the rafters of a loft, which explained the shoddy stitch-work on Sam's wound, at least. If only Dad could see them now. Motel room full of trash and the smell of boy and both of them practically out of commission for the next two days, if not three, before they could really do any good about the lead on the Weeping Woman down by the border. Dean had a feeling Dad wouldn't be proud.

 

Sam was holding his T-shirt up awkwardly over the wound, which was soaking the waistband of his sweatpants with blood. “Ditch it,” Dean said, and Sam did.

 

“Sorry.”

 

“Nah.” Dean stifled a yawn, reached over Sam's shoulder for the whiskey and took a swig to clear his pounding head, shooed Sam further up the bed so he could kneel between his legs to re-stitch the gash. “Fix this before your guts fall out.”

 

It was quiet up here. No one had the rooms to either side of them as far as they knew and traffic on the street below was almost nonexistent and the town proper was far enough away that only the barest modicum of city light came through the thick curtains at night, and the soft blue neon glow of the motel sign. Coming in earlier that night had felt, Dean thought, a bit like coming back to a home, even if _coming home_ consisted of dousing cuts with peroxide and sticking needles into his brother and nursing his head with an ice pack and _Law & Order _reruns.

 

He liked hunting with Sam. He liked it a lot. And he knew—even though Sam tried his best to hide it—that Sam liked hunting with him, too. Or at the very least hated it a little less than hunting with Dad. Besides the blood-and-guts aspect of things it almost felt like a road-trip, so far: no Dad to tell them when they could and couldn't stop to sight-see or grab food, which they did, so long as they kept on schedule. They'd eaten gas station taquitos on a scenic overlook up in Nor-Cal a few days earlier on their way down to Mokelumne Hill and he'd caught Sam smiling a little when the wind pushed against their faces and he'd thought that this was good.

 

Dean's needle was shaky with his exhaustion so Sam touched the back of his hand with his bloody fingers to keep it steady while he worked.

 

Besides the faint noise of the lamp and the occasional groan of some machinery somewhere it was cool, calm, still. Sam hardly flinched when the needle went in and out, just sat, passively, eyelids heavy with sleep, watching the hypnotic movement of Dean's hand.

 

“Thanks,” he murmured, when Dean was halfway done.

 

“Next time,” Dean said, “don't get in the damn thing's way in the first place. Phouka got nasty claws.”

 

Sam smiled. “You're telling me.”

 

He went quiet again, and Dean focused on the thread curling in and out of his warm slick skin, on pulling it taut enough to close the gap. He tied it off carefully when he was done, wiped the blood from his hand on Sam's sweatpants—they were ruined already anyway.

 

“Go wash it off,” he said, hauling himself back to his feet to put the needle and thread away.

 

Sam didn't move for a minute. His bare shoulders were hunched up and he was looking down at the gash, palm of his hand hovering over it a little.

 

“I can't do this, Dean,” he said, very quietly.

 

It hardly registered in his head until he was already finished putting away the first-aid kit and had a towel wrapped around his hands. He turned back to him.

 

“Yeah, you can,” he said, words coming slow—his head pounded away at itself. He tossed the towel away and rounded the bed, intent on lying down to soothe how much his everything hurt. “We rocked this case, man,” he finished, on a yawn.

 

Sam still didn't move, and now, from behind, Dean couldn't help pausing to stare at the curve of his spine beneath his skin, the way the lamp made him look golden.

 

“You think every case is gonna be this simple?” Sam asked, voice low and rough and almost dream-like, as if he were half-asleep already. “First real job of our own and I nearly spill my guts all over that barn...”

 

“Part of the job, Sammy, as long as we ain't dead we're doing great.”

 

Sam paused a long time while Dean sank back into bed, flat on his back, covering his throbbing eyes with his hands.

 

“Are you happy?” Sam asked, eventually, very softly, into the dark behind Dean's eyelids.

 

Dean pulled his hands away, blinked up at the ceiling, considering.

 

“Well—I mean, yeah, I guess.”

 

“You really wanna do this the rest of your life? Get torn up like this every other weekend chasing monsters with Dad?”

 

“And you,” Dean said. It came out on its own, even though he knew in the back of his aching skull what a stupid remark to make that was.

 

“Dean.”

 

“You ain't really leaving, are you?” he asked, even though he knew better, even though he knew he'd regret it. It was late, late at night, practically morning, and his hands smelled like copper, and he might as well.

 

Sam shifted uncomfortably on the edge of the mattress. “I'm not happy,” he said, small.

 

“Not even out here, like we are? No Dad, just you and me?”

 

“I like being out here with you. More than—” But he stopped, swallowed. Dean watched his brother's ribs swell and fall, all the shadows between them soft and cool. “But it's not what's gonna make me happy. Not forever.”

 

Dean bit his tongue. He couldn't trust himself to keep from saying something awful.

 

“I am leaving,” Sam said. “Someday.”

 

“Someday?”

 

Sam's shoulders bowed. “It's not as easy as it looked in Flagstaff.”

 

“Told you.”

 

“No, you didn't.”

 

“Mm.”

 

Quiet. Blue light on the curtains.

 

“What would make you happy?” Dean asked, closing his eyes, cheating himself of everything but Sam's voice, unsure if it was the right question to ask.

 

“You know.”

 

“Getting out.”

 

Sam didn't say anything. The _and having you_ still managed to make itself apparent, somehow, in the silence.

 

“You know—and I ain't saying it to be mean, Sammy, but if you ever did leave, Dad would—I mean, he'd disown you, man. He'd never forgive you.”

 

“I don't care.”

 

“But you could never come _back._ That's what I'm saying. Like, you gotta think about these things.”

 

“Why do you want me to stay so bad?” Sam said, giving a little laugh that didn't have any substance to it, and Dean felt the bed shift, knew Sam was looking at him now. “Thought you'd be a little grateful.”

 

Dean opened his eyes to that, sharply, sat up a little to look him in the face.

 

“Grateful?”

 

Whatever smile was sitting on Sam's mouth died, slowly, and he let his eyes drop down.

 

He shrugged.

 

“I'd be out of your hair, you know,” he said. “You wouldn't have to worry about me anymore. Or the whole—freak little brother thing—”

 

The whole _I-love-you_ thing.

 

“Oh, shut up, Sam, I don't think you're a freak, I never did,” Dean snapped, dropping his heavy head back against the bedstead and the wall. “Jesus. No one's ever gonna wanna kiss you if you keep pulling that self-hate shit.”

 

It came out too harsh, too much, but Sam didn't seem to be bothered—he turned his face back away, but Dean thought he saw his shoulder-blades relax, thought he saw the barest edge of a smile come back to his lips.

 

“Christ,” Dean sighed. “What time is it?”

 

“You deserve to be happy, too,” Sam said softly. “If that means hunting forever, then take it, but if you've ever wanted something else—something better—”

 

“You know what makes me happy?” Dean sat up all the way, leaning forward, reaching back out for the whiskey and holding it up, as if in toast to Sam's posture on the edge of the bed and the blue light. “This. The road, and target practise, and you.”

 

He took a long drink. It burned in his throat.

 

Sam didn't say anything. Didn't point out how unfair it was to hang his happiness on one person, even though it was, and Dean knew it. Didn't bother reminding him that he would be gone someday; didn't seem to think it necessary to push that pain. Didn't protest. Didn't press. He just watched Dean drink, and then watched him put the bottle back and curse at the 4:46 on the old-fashioned clock.

 

“Fuck,” Dean groaned, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “We gotta be on the road in three hours.”

 

“Might as well just stay up,” Sam murmured, picking at the bedspread.

 

Their backs were to one another. The conversation was over, and Dean didn't know where it left them. He wasn't upset, or angry, or sad, or anything, really, other than tired, and wanting nothing, really, at this point, than to sit here quietly with Sam, and not talk about leaving or the life or Dad or anything, and to pretend that this was going to be the standard for every morning of the rest of their lives, because it seemed like a pretty good standard. Working with Sam. It was too early to think about how easily it could all just go away.

 

He got up—crouched down by his discarded Levi's to fish his cigarettes from one pocket and his Zippo from another. He felt Sam watching him as he went out onto the walkway above the parking lot, leaving the door open, cold February nighttime on his bare arms and the blue neon sign casting his shadow at strange angles on the concrete.

 

Dean lit up and sucked smoke in, breathed it out the way Hettie Blue Jones had shown him years and years ago, looking out at the barren streetlights of Mokelumne Hill far below and away, and the acres of trees and open land between.

 

Sam followed him out a few moments later, stomach and hips still streaked with his drying blood, the new stitches glistening a little in the light. He leaned his elbows on the walkway railing, silent, looking out the way Dean was.

 

The angles of him felt sad. It occurred to Dean, standing beside him, in his concussed half-daze, that now would be the perfect moment to turn his body and kiss him—to give him that one little bit of his happiness, no matter what it meant—to collect the chill and the light and the black sky and the rough concrete and the open door and the smoke into the one instant where they touched the way Dean understood, now, that they both wanted so badly, and keep it like something precious, preserved forever—

 

But Sam said, “Can I have one of those?” and gestured to the Marlboros in Dean's hand, and Dean said, “You don't smoke,” and Sam said, “Can I have one?” And Dean held the pack out, and Sam took one, and Dean held up his lighter to the end, and Sam sucked it in like it was breath, and that was that, and he didn't kiss him. He didn't know what to do.

 

They stood there. Stubbed out their cigarettes on the railing and kept standing, two boys, arm to arm, watching the sun fade up over the edge of the world.

* * *

 

* * *

 

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

There was nothing in the world quite like the feeling of being the only one awake in a dark and sleeping house. One part loneliness, one part peace, one part the inexplicable feeling that something unfamiliar was stirring in another room, just out of sight; the omnipresence of sounds that got drowned out in daylight , the dishwasher running, the heater clanking. The light of Lisa's sleeping DVR and the sodium-yellow glow of the streetlamp at the end of the drive across the street and the neon-green numbers of the clock above the stove. And the quiet, beneath everything else, like shallow water.

 

Dean did this sometimes. Woke and went downstairs to wander around the house when it was like that, when Lisa and Ben were deep into their dreams and even the creaking stair couldn't rouse them. Sometimes sitting on the couch alone for a few hours, watching everything be still, was what he needed to get himself back to sleep; sometimes he just needed to be alone, utterly, to let whatever was racing through his head play itself out and be gone.

 

Sometimes he wondered if this was what it felt like to be a ghost. Passing through the stillness forever.

 

He hadn't gone to work that day. He'd overslept, exhausted from the ordeal of the graveyard the night before, but he'd slept too much and now, in the nighttime, he was too awake, and he wasn't doing Lisa any good with his tossing and turning.

 

He passed the calendar on his way into the kitchen for a beer and just like every other time its pages rose and fell behind him. Newly February. A week out from Valentine's Day. There was grave dirt still beneath his fingernails when he paused to look at them in the refrigerator light.

 

In the living room he sank down on the couch with a sigh and put the bottle on the side table and sat there, facing the TV, which looked back at him with its blank black face.

 

He was at a loss.

 

He'd been trying not to think too hard about it, earlier that day, and had mostly managed to stave it off in sleep, but the house was big, empty, and quiet, and he couldn't help letting it seep back in through the cracks. He'd seen Sam out in that cemetery, and he didn't know what it meant, and Cas had been no help. Cas had left him in the driveway with no solution to this problem.

 

He'd done that hunt for closure and it hadn't worked, asked—foolishly, he realised now—for Cas to wipe it all away and been refused, and now—now he didn't know what to do. He could feel those godforsaken memories building up in the back of his skull, sitting anxiously in the next room behind the half-closed door, in their weird, neat, chronological way. He didn't need a calendar to know what they were going to hit him with next, and how everything after it had fallen into place. The relentless march towards where he was now, in the present: alone in the dark in Lisa Braeden's house, a thousand tons heavy with grief.

 

There was no fighting it off. No climbing out of the hole he'd fallen into. He wondered, vaguely, if this was going to kill him—overwhelm him—he wondered if it really were possible to die of a broken heart like all those old fairy tales and ballads said. If that was going to be him, soon.

 

Where they came from, what purpose they were trying to serve, he didn't know, and was finding it harder and harder to care. All he knew was that he loved them more than anything and wanted them gone in equal measure, paradoxically, couldn't help craving the pain they put him through if only for those little glimpses and tastes and feelings of Sam, and couldn't help wishing them away in the same breath.

 

Hence, his frozenness.

 

Dean closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the top of the couch, listening to the hum and rumble of the dishwasher, the occasional click and groan of the fridge. He closed his eyes for a long, long time.

 

But then something moved—intruded on his awareness, abruptly—he opened his eyes and immediately sat up ramrod straight, facing directly ahead, his heart jumping up into his mouth.

 

It was back. The figure he'd seen on the side of the road and the figure he'd seen at the entrance to the cemetery and now it was standing just inside the light coming in through the slatted blinds, quietly pushing into his peripheral vision, close enough that if he stood up and reached out he would have been able to touch—

 

Sam. Too drenched in shadow for any detail to make itself apparent save the slope of his jaw and the dull shape of his eye and the round of his shoulder.

 

“You're not real,” Dean whispered, almost desperately, glued into place. “I know you're not real.”

 

Sam said nothing. He only watched. And there was something about it, something _shifting_ in that corner of the room, as if his shape were a pillar of inconsolable sadness, and it was rippling outward from the space he occupied, sick blind sorrow radiating outward in massive waves, to the point where Dean could feel his stomach turning.

 

“There's no way you can be real,” Dean said, hoarsely. He was afraid to move his head lest the vision be some kind of optical illusion, a mistake—afraid to move lest he lose this opportunity to _look_ at him.

 

Sam still said nothing. Everything about him was a massive frigid silence.

 

Slowly, cautiously, holding him there in the corner of his eye, Dean stood up, and swallowed hard. He lifted his hand, gently, and held it out towards him, but Sam didn't move, and of course he didn't move—he was nothing but shadow and thought—

 

“I'm making you up,” Dean said, listening to his own voice tremble, “that's what I'm doing. I'm making you up in my head.”

 

That had to be it. That had to be.

 

“Because if I'm not—then you're real but you ain't Sam.”

 

Saying it out loud was like a punch to the gut.

 

“You ain't him.” He swallowed hard again, pushing his heart back down, still distantly hoping beyond all hope that he was wrong on both counts, and somehow Sam would reach out and touch his hand and be real. “You're some— _thing,_ shifter, demon—”

 

Sam was still as stone. Dean felt his fingers curling up, empty.

 

“What do you want?” he said, forgetting himself, turning his head—and Sam was gone.

 

He stood there, arm outstretched towards the empty corner, looking into the place where he had been.

 

 _I can't do this,_ he thought.

 

The stillness passed by him, locked into himself. Coursing around him like life around a ghost.


	14. XIV

_Argonne, Wisconsin_

_May 2002_

 

Sam turned nineteen and didn't say a word about it. Dean had a feeling that if he hadn't mentioned it the morning of, he might have forgotten it was his birthday at all.

 

He was like that these days. Taciturn, mechanical, running on his default settings.

 

He'd graduated high school a year ago this month, but Dean tried not to think about that; tried not to think about how he'd been across the state with Dad, clearing an old Victorian of a whole family of angry ghosts, while Sam was walking across the stage. Of course he'd protested when Dad had dragged him away on that hunt, and of course he'd explained and apologised his heart out to Sam before and after and on the phone during, but even though Sam nodded and told him it was fine he knew it wasn't. He knew Sam could have cared less whether Dad was there or not. He knew how much it stung him to look out at the audience in the high school gym and see not one single familiar face.

 

He kept his high school diploma folded up in a neat paper square at the bottom of his duffel amongst all the balls of lint and dust, Dean knew. He saw it in there sometimes.

 

This was life, with no more school to hold them down in any one place. Over the summer after Sam's senior year it felt, to Dean, at least, as if they were finally getting down to business the way Dad had always intended, without the trappings and snares of trying to pass as normal people. The truck, the Impala, the ever-growing multitude of weapons hidden inside them, books, credit cards, the same motel rooms in every town, just with a different colour scheme, and scars built up on his body and his brother's like pins in a map, each one with a story, layers upon layers of skin.

 

Dean reckoned they must have traversed the entire length of the country at least twice in that last year. Somehow it never seemed to grow old. Somehow he never tired of passing through the mountains with Sam in the passenger seat, poring over a map, knees folded up against the dash—wheeling through the desert, watching rust-stained empty Sinclair stations flash by, speeding down Deep South backroads while hanging moss slashed across the Impala's roof, parking a little ways up from the beaches in the Carolinas to eat lunch while the sea wind came in through the windows; he liked it like that; he hoped Sam liked it, too, and maybe he did. He didn't have that fire in him so much anymore, but Dean could still make him smile, and Dean felt like they were both waiting for something to change or slot into place, something that would make them both happy the way they wanted, whatever it was.

 

Sam didn't talk about leaving anymore. Part of Dean dared to hope that maybe he'd given it up, that all he had to do was just grind down his discomfort in this life until it was smooth sailing, and then he'd stay, and they could hunt together, be brothers together.

 

Even, Dean thought sometimes—looking at him, pushed up against the flat setting sky as if he belonged there more than anywhere else, beautiful sun-smelling lean-muscled boy— _be_ together. If he could ever find it in himself to be brave enough.

* * *

 

He had the radio on, sitting in the windowsill. Old cracked plastic thing Sam had found on the top shelf in the closet. He couldn't find anything that wouldn't play without static, but he thought that what did come through maybe sounded like James Taylor.

 

He had the window open, the hot breeze coming through, a cigarette in his mouth, the door open, too. Sam was somewhere out on the terrace, probably sitting with his legs through the bars of the second-floor walkway, watching the family down in 201 in the pool below. Dean, for his part, was doing his best to make the room presentable before Dad came back that evening from upstate—hauling the motel trash can around with one hand, crumpling up napkins and squashing Chinese take-out boxes and stuffing them in, kicking Sam's jeans and shirts up from off the floor and catching them in mid-air to shove in the general direction of his duffel.

 

After tonight, as far as he knew, they were heading down to Colorado for the third time in the last few months—he made a mental note never to settle down in Colorado; it was starting to seem like a hotbed for things that needed to be shot—and if all went well, Dad might send him and Sam up into the mountains to work their own job. The thought made him smile a little around his smoke. It had been a while since they'd been on their own hunt together.

 

Humming absently to whatever snatches of music made their way through the static, Dean hopped over on one foot to turn up the radio, avoiding an empty pizza box on the floor. He was bending to pick it up when he caught a glimpse of what looked like a soy sauce stain under one of Sam's pillows on his unmade bed.

 

“Jesus,” he muttered around the stub of his cigarette. Loved that kid, but he had zero skill with chopsticks.

 

He put down the wastebasket and grabbed up the pillow to see how bad it was. A manila envelope slipped out from underneath it and fell to the floor.

 

Dean paused, holding the pillow up over his head.

 

The radio changed over to something fuzzy from Creedence Clearwater Revival. He put the pillow back on the bed and crouched down.

 

The envelope wasn't marked, and it wasn't sealed, either—the top flap was open a little bit. Dean had his fingers halfway inside before he thought twice.

 

Whatever it was, it was Sam's, and it hadn't been out in the open. It wasn't exactly his to look at.

 

Dean hesitated—he could feel the edges of pieces of paper inside.

 

Gingerly he took hold of one of them and pulled it up just enough to see the writing at the top. That was as far as he would pry.

 

It was a copy of something, he could tell by the blackened edges of the page. At the top it read _Application for Undergraduate Admission._ The letterhead was for Dartmouth.

 

Dean inhaled too hard and coughed, dropping his cigarette onto the floor, and stood up, letting the envelope fall onto the bed. He stood, angled away from it, as if it was something poisonous, as if it were going to leap up and attack him, which was ridiculous. He knew it was ridiculous, but he felt cold all over.

 

He tossed his cigarette into the trash and picked the envelope up again, gripping its edges so hard that the paper dented under his thumbs.

 

He knew it was wrong to go through Sam's things like this, knew that if Sam walked in on him right now he'd never hear the end of it, but he had to see, and be sure this was really what it looked like.

 

There were at least five more applications in the envelope. One of them was for Augustana, another for Stanford—he stopped there, shoving the pages back in, pushing it away from him and dropping down onto the bed to hold his mouth in his hands.

 

Well, wasn't he an idiot. To think that just because Sam had stopped talking about leaving, he'd stopped considering it, too. He was still going—this was proof, and proof that he had more of a plan now than he did in Utah three years ago, which meant that, sooner rather than later, in all probability, Dean _was_ going to wake up one morning and Sam would be gone. And not just gone—in _college_ , back to trying to pass as a normal person. Dean couldn't think of anything more opposite to the way they lived their lives now than Sam in a college dorm room, in a lecture hall, in a library. That was a world that just didn't reconcile with his.

 

Dean covered his eyes with his hands, scratching absently at his head, listening to the static on the radio, feeling the clouds pass through the sunlight in the window. He could feel the envelope next to him like something sharp and ugly.

 

A small voice in his head murmured _what right do you have to be angry?_ And he didn't have an answer, because he didn't have that right, and he knew it; he simply felt alone, and left behind, even though Sam was right outside and down the walkway, oblivious to the fact that his secret had been found out.

 

Inevitably the sun began to go down, the longer he sat there, all the cleaning half-done and the radio still blathering incoherent sounds.

 

Eventually he moved enough to light another cigarette but then he went still again, looking at the edge of the table by the window, waiting for Sam's shadow to darken the doorway.

 

The ash from his smoke fell on the carpet and he ground it in deeper with the toe of his boot.

 

“Hey.”

 

Dean looked up, startled.

 

Sam was scuffing off his bare feet on the threshold, the curve of his throat glistening with sweat. He yawned, rolled back his shoulders, and turned his easy, lazy smile on Dean—and then his eyes dropped to the envelope and he stiffened immediately.

 

“Where did you find that?” he asked, thickly, softly.

 

“Under your pillow. I was cleaning.”

 

Sam swallowed; Dean could see his Adam's apple moving up and down, saw him bite at the inside of his mouth.

 

Sam shifted uneasily on his feet.

 

“Did you look at it?” he said, in the tone of voice that suggested he already knew the answer to that question.

 

Dean nodded, looked away. Funny—he'd kind of thought he might start shouting when Sam walked in, tell him off about running away from his family and his responsibilities, et cetera ad nauseum, but he didn't feel that in him. It wasn't as if he hadn't been expecting this, someday. He'd just kind of hoped—

 

“Why didn't you tell me?” he asked, knee juddering up and down against the floor.

 

Sam laughed mirthlessly. “You really gotta ask that?”

 

“No.”

 

Sam was still standing just outside the door, rubbing anxiously at his arms, and Dean wished he'd come inside so they could talk on equal grounds, just _talk_ about this, and what it meant, but he didn't. He kept his feet on the hot concrete and didn't come in, as if he were ashamed to.

 

“I already sent them in,” Sam said quietly, ducking his head a little. “Those are just copies.”

 

“How long ago?”

 

“Last fall.”

 

Dean flicked the end of his cigarette into the trash across the room.

 

“When do you hear back?”

 

Sam shifted his weight again.

 

“Augustana already said yes.”

 

Dean didn't know what to say, so he picked up the envelope again, held it upright, the flap still open. He was trying to think of a way to deal with the way this was hurting, to remind himself that this wasn't about _him_ , even though it felt like it.

 

“How you gonna pay for it?” he said; it came out like a dig and he immediately regretted it. He laid the envelope down on his knees, looked up at Sam. “'Cause let me tell you, Dad won't give you a dime.”

 

“I'll figure it out,” Sam said, meeting his gaze straight-on.

 

“I don't know if you've noticed, Sammy, but we're really, really poor.”

 

“I'm a good student. There's financial aid.”

 

Dean swallowed hard, trying to swallow down all the angry, awful things he wanted to say, too, but he could still feel them pushing up against his mouth. “Sam—”

 

“This is how I get to be happy,” Sam said, interrupting him, and he sounded choked all of a sudden, stuck, and that bothered Dean enough to get him to keep his mouth shut and just look at him, try to pick out his shape from the sun going down behind him. “This is what I want. I want to go to school and be normal, Dean, I want to get away—”

 

“From me?”

 

“From Dad,” Sam ground out, “and from these shitty rooms, and the concussions, and the near-death experiences—and it's not like I'm going away forever—”

 

“Dad will never let you come back,” Dean said.

 

“Fuck Dad.”

 

“You won't _want_ to come back.”

 

“Fuck you. You don't know that.”

 

“I dunno, Sam, picking _normal_ over this, I mean, _this_ is _us—”_

 

“Stop it.”

 

Dean stopped.

 

The sun was pulling all the colour from his brother's silhouette in the doorway. He looked like a paper cutout, standing there, looking in.

 

“I deserve this chance, Dean,” Sam said, his voice low and tense and upset. “I deserve to be happy.”

 

“I want—”

 

But he stopped again, acutely aware of the sinking feeling in his chest that neither of them were saying what they really meant, that it would be better to let the conversation die there before anyone else got hurt.

 

“No,” Sam said softly. “Say it. What do you want?”

 

“Forget it,” Dean said, standing up, finally, reaching over to turn off the radio. The silence that filled in the space where the static had been was oppressive. “'S not about me, is it.”

 

“Tell me.”

 

“Sam.”

 

“Tell me.”

 

“I want you to be happy,” Dean said, too loud; his head felt tight; he had a headache coming on. “I wanted you to be happy here, with me. Somehow. I don't know how. But I wanted you to find that here. I wanted you to be happy here.”

 

Sam looked at him, eyes wide, pulling his lower lip between his teeth. He rolled it there, a nerve in his throat twitching, and Dean knew he was trying as hard as he could not to cry. It cut him to the bone, that look; he had to turn his head away.

 

“I can't,” Sam said, soft and miserable. Dean heard his voice break somewhere in there and he couldn't look. He fisted up a handful of the sheets on Sam's bed instead, gripped it tight. “I tried, Dean, but I can't.”

 

An hour of silence seemed to pass in the space between them.

* * *

 

* * *

 

 

_Cicero, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

It was a warm spring in Cicero. The snow began to crawl back from the curb-sides mid-March, and more often than not the pale, thin sun shone through the day, masked only by the clouds that rolled in on occasion. Morning joggers re-appeared and the kid down the street walked the dogs in the evenings and outdoor work was starting up again for Dean and for the world.

 

Things had the feel of an eternal Sunday afternoon—still, luminous, quiet, and anxious. No amount of busy work could seem to break it. Even the sound of the jackhammers at the sites Dean drove to every morning seemed more like a dull roar than a real noise.

 

He wasn't doing well.

 

But he was pretty good at hiding it, at least in his opinion. Grit his teeth and just kept moving. There was really nothing else to do.

 

February settled out and Lisa hung up the next page of her calendar—March was a pale yellow—and Dean pushed himself as much as he could into focusing on her, rather than himself. Even at his lowest he could still feel good in making her smile. Ben was getting old enough to weather evenings by himself; he took her out to dinner at least once every two weeks, and that was good; it was probably the calmest he ever felt, looking at her across a restaurant table, knowing that she'd keep her hand on his shoulder all the way home.

 

He made a point of telling her he loved her, because it was true, and he wanted her to know it was true—every time she picked up the phone, every time she walked in the front door, every night before they went to sleep. There was a difference, he was coming to realise, between the way he loved her and the way he'd loved everyone else. Loving Lisa was easy. There was no struggle to it. He hoped she felt the same way, hoped that it was a simple thing to love him, and looked for every opportunity to make himself easier on her heart. And he told her every chance he got, because he hadn't said it nearly enough to the last person he'd loved. And he never, ever wanted to make that mistake again.

 

He was good at losing himself in her, and good at covering up the way he felt himself to be walking on broken glass every moment of the day. But he wasn't doing well.

 

March slipped by, a thin cloud under the sun.

 

He began to see a shrink three times a week. That is, he saw the shrink twice, and never went back again; he walked into the woman's office, overwhelmed with the smell of leather, and sat in the chair across from her and when she asked him to tell her about himself he found himself with nothing to say; when, somehow, her simple roundabout questions about everyday life led inevitably to the Sam-shaped hole in the universe at his right, he found himself slamming shut, automatically wary.

 

The most he ever told her was that his brother had passed away, in those words exactly. Everything else was his and his alone.

 

The second session he left after five minutes, having said nothing to her, and never went back. During the hours he was meant to be at her office he drove out of town instead, parked off the road in a turn-off he'd found on the edge of the countryside and sat in his truck and watched the traffic go by, rocking him on his wheels every now and again.

 

Sometimes he drove past the Okoro house—he'd patched up their roof a few days after he'd put the ghost down—and tried to feel gratified that they were all moved back in, and everything seemed back to normal. But it didn't come easy.

 

April blew in, chilly and rainy, and when Dean was stuck at home, the weather too nasty to afford the company any leeway to do their work, he found himself pacing, often, slowly back and forth across the living room, always unconsciously avoiding the corner by the window where Sam had appeared to him.

 

Cas hadn't come down to see him in a long time. Nothing had visited him, in fact, for several weeks. Not even memory. But he wasn't foolish enough to think that the whole ordeal was over, which almost made it worse.

 

May would be here soon. More than anything he dreaded what new kind of grief May would bring.

 

It was near impossible to believe that in a few weeks it would have been a year—a whole year since the last time he'd touched his little brother, a whole year since the moment he'd watched him take that leap. And in some small, horrible part of himself, he was almost proud—proud that May was almost here and not once had he stopped grieving and not once had he lived up to his godforsaken promise to be happy and complete in this town.

 

 _Look, Sammy,_ he wanted to say, _I didn't let you go. Not even for a second._

 

Which was nothing to be proud of, he knew.

 

But there was a kind of satisfaction in being terrible.

 

He drove in the rain one morning to a jewelry shop on the square to look at engagement rings. Didn't ask to see any of them out of their cases, and didn't spend a single dime. But he looked, and he thought. He'd never considered himself the kind of person who would get married, but then again he'd never considered himself the kind of person who would ever live in one place for almost a year, either.

 

He did all of this—worked and paced and avoided the shrink and thought about weddings in all their vague white catalogue splendor and fooled nearly everyone into thinking he was doing alright—but he wasn't _doing_ anything.

 

The house was full of light and open windows and a kind of anxiety came with that, too. Whether they felt it or not Dean knew it was getting under the Braedens' skin. No matter how close they all came to one another there was still the sensation of being magnets opposed to each other, rounded off and pushed away in constant orbit. Set jaws and tension.

 

Ben complained of his listlessness; the novelty of Dean Living Here seemed to have finally worn itself out. And Lisa looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, even as she smiled at him or spoke to him, afraid, almost, to meet him head-on, as if he'd burst apart in front of her. And he sat. Waiting for the breaking point.

 

In the moments when he was clear-headed enough to think about things he tried to put a name to the constant feeling he had, that someone was gathering up his ribs in their hands and squeezing them all together like a handful of twigs. _Drowning_ seemed to be the name that made most sense.

* * *

 

* * *

 

 _Somewhere Off_ _County Road 240, Texas_

_August 2002_

 

The house could hardly be called a house at all. More accurately it was three standing walls with a crumbling, straggling fourth at the back, and a slope of shingling that might once have been a roof. It was set far enough back from the road that no one came snooping around, but not far enough to be swallowed up by the trees, and there was room enough out back for the truck and the car. Three camping cots were enough to sleep on, holes in the shingling enough to see the stars through, warm enough at night to forego heavy blankets. Sure, mosquitos bit their bare skin in the night, but all in all it wasn't the worst place they'd ever stayed, by Dean's standards.

 

He kind of liked it here. He was beginning to allow himself to acknowledge when he liked things. He'd been leaving good things behind himself for twenty-three years; it was about time, he thought, that he lived a little more in the moment, enjoyed things while they lasted, and then took them with him when they moved on, as a reminder that there were good things in this life even when it was hard. He liked this quiet shack, and the way the trees pushed in through the crumbling back wall, and he liked Kilgore when he drove up into it for groceries, and he liked hearing the wind through the woods at night. He liked hearing Sam breathe on the cot beside his, with his arm hanging off the edge and his bare toes pointed up at the holes in the ceiling. He liked the day it had rained last week—even though everything they owned had gotten damp, the world had smelled clean and new for hours afterward, and he'd felt it get under his own skin and he'd felt clean, too.

 

He liked it here. Right up until the moment that the screen door, barely clinging to its hinges, opened up on Wednesday evening, as he was sitting on Dad's green cooler in the back room, cleaning his pistol while Dad cleaned his rifle, the hazy sun going down at their backs, and Sam came in like a shadow passing across the wall with an envelope in his hands, and Dean looked up at him, and every good thing in that crumbling house fell apart.

* * *

 

“I got a full ride,” he said.

 

“Dad,” he said, mouth trembling with a smile he could barely contain, “I got a full ride. Stanford. They want me. They really want me, Dad.”

 

“I'm going to college,” he said, and then the smile broke wide across his face and full of his white teeth and the house, save for the humming of summer insects, was silent as death.

 

The first thing Dean felt was cornered, and it wasn't on Sam's account. He was acutely and suddenly aware that he was only a foot from his father and that his father had a gun in his hand and that Sam's smile was completely ignorant of the fire it had just lit beneath that man.

 

He supposed that, somewhere in there, he was startled—angry, shocked, upset—but right now all he knew was the awful gut-dropping feeling of something happening that had been a long, long, dreadful time coming.

 

Dad spoke like a pick-axe coming through drywall.

 

“College,” he said, as if it were the word _murder,_ and Dean couldn't stop staring at the envelope Sam was clutching to his chest—tighter, now, as if it were some kind of shield.

 

The smile dimmed on Sam's face. He seemed rooted into place.

 

Dad stood up, and Dean did, too, immediately, all his instincts kicking into place. He saw Sam push back against the wall, straightening his shoulders, realising too late what a mistake he'd made.

 

“You're not going to college,” Dad said, his jaw tight and dangerous, looking at Sam so hard Dean thought his little brother might burst apart.

 

“Dad,” Dean said, weakly.

 

“Shut up.”

 

He did. But he edged around the table littered with gun parts anyway, slowly, ready to move between Dad and Sam if he had to.

 

Sam set his jaw, looking directly into Dad's face, and Dean didn't know what to do except stand and look and wait for the explosion.

 

“I am,” Sam said, firm and sharp, and Dean felt a surge of weird angry pride in him for that before the situation settled back in, “I am going. You can't stop me. I've already said yes.”

 

“No son of mine is going to waste his life in a place like that.”

 

Sam barked a laugh, a noise like a frightened, petulant dog might make. “ _Waste—”_

 

“You are not leaving this family,” Dad said again, louder. He was making fists.

 

Dean moved, then, moved before he could tell his feet not to—he slipped between them, back to Sam, holding up his hands—part of him wanted to turn around and shake him for doing this, for doing this now, just when everything was going so well, but the bigger part of him knew that there was time for anger later—right now Dad had the look on his face that meant he wanted to put boot to rib and Dean was damned if that was going to happen.

 

“You can't stop me,” Sam snarled.

 

“You selfish—” Dad growled, jolting forward with a fist raised, but Dean gave a startled shout and acted, pushing back on Dad's shoulders, and Dad jerked, stunned, let his fist fall open and smacked Dean across the face hard enough to push him out of his way.

 

Dean stumbled, wheeled, face burning and ears ringing, and he heard Sam shout his name, heard a _thud_ and twisted round to see Dad, hands fisted in Sam's shirt, pinning him against the wall, and he froze.

 

Dad was glaring into Sam's face, cold, hard, irrational rage, and Sam was glaring right back, lip curling, almost feral in his anger—there was that _fire_ behind his eyes—Dean hadn't seen it in years—

 

“Dad,” Dean shouted, hoarsely, one last feeble attempt to keep them from coming to blows—but Dad let Sam go, then, and stepped back, clenching and unclenching his fists, gone deadly calm.

 

“You get out of my sight,” he said, voice trembling with rage. “You go. You leave your family and your responsibilities and you go, you selfish, stupid, ungrateful boy. And you don't ever come back.”

 

Sam's nostrils were flaring, his eyes narrow and hateful and aflame, and all Dean could do was watch—stand there, hunched, holding his stinging face in his hand, while Sam bristled up against the wall, and while he slowly and carefully unfolded his body, and walked, eyes on Dad the whole time, to where his duffel was lying on his cot, and slung it over his shoulder, and while his eyes slid to Dean for one heart-stopping minute when the fire in them died—and he looked, for a split second, as if he was going to be sick at the proximity of the door and the wide empty world out behind it—and while he tore his gaze away and then walked, straight-backed, into the front room, and out the screen door.

* * *

 

Later all Dean would remember of that night was his own voice, breaking the quiet left in the space where Sam had been, screaming, “What did you do? _What did you do_?!” at his father until his voice gave out, and running out into the road as if to chase Sam down on his own two feet.

 

But by the time his boots hit the pavement Sam was nowhere to be seen, and darkness was falling, relentlessly.

* * *

 

_Kilgore, Texas_

 

He went after him. Of course he went after him. Even though Dad barked at him not to set foot out of that crumbling house he went—slung himself into the Impala and tore down the county road up towards Kilgore, biting at his lower lip, the trees and the darkening sky hurtling past him.

 

It was a stretch, a wild guess. There was no surefire way to know that Sam was in Kilgore, or if he was even headed in that direction. He'd probably been picked up by the first passing truck. He could have gone any way, back towards Tatum, or even up to Longview—a map of the sprawling county roads and woods and straggling towns was pressed up against the inside of Dean's head and it was big and confusing, so he sped towards Kilgore, hoping that by some grace of God he'd be able to stumble on his brother there, waiting out the night before he headed west to Stanford— _fucking_ Stanford—

 

And there was no surefire way to know where Sam was staying, so Dean went for the default. First motel in the Yellow Pages. Jim Rockford. In all probability Sam was hunkered down some place where even Dad, with all his instincts, wouldn't have been able to sniff him out. But there was the chance, the slightest chance, that he'd done the opposite—it was something to do with the way he'd looked at Dean for that split second before he'd walked out—there was the barest sliver of a chance that he wanted to be found.

 

So he went. Pulled up into the barren parking lot of the America's Best Value Inn and asked at the front for Jim Rockford. Behind him through the glass front door the sky was cool and black, still burning a little orange at the horizon, and his heart was pulsing up in his throat.

 

The skinny, fragile-looking woman behind the counter hardly looked up at him from the register. Jim Rockford, Room 53.

 

When he heard it he almost couldn't move. He stood there a minute, probably looking like a goddamn fool, while the woman went back to her business.

 

If he went down to that room, or even if he didn't, no matter what happened then—nothing was ever going to be the same.

 

The woman looked up at him from beneath her bangs and over her glasses. Her brows pulled up. “Sir?” she said. “Are you alright?”

 

“I'm fine,” Dean lied, turning his face away from her, “thanks,” and left the desk.

 

The hallway seemed at once both endless and far too short, but he hurried along it, trying not to think about what he was doing. He didn't know what he was going to say if Sam opened the door. Or what he was going to do if Sam didn't. Or if he was going to leave here with Sam in the passenger seat or if he was going to leave alone or if he was going to leave at all—

 

He found the door. He knocked on it, probably too hard and one time too many. None of this made any sense. He shouldn't have come. He should leave before Sam had a chance to look through the peephole—

 

But then the handle turned and the door opened and he was there, standing in the open space, looking right into his face, and everything seemed to converge and come together and flatten itself out in that exact moment and Dean was there and he couldn't walk away now and this was it, he supposed.

 

He realised abruptly that he didn't have anything to say.

 

Sam stared at him, eyelids flickering, jaw tightening. His eyes darted away, rested on the doorjamb between them.

 

“What are you doing here?” he said.

 

“I don't know,” Dean said. It was the truth.

 

Now that he was here he couldn't stop looking at him. It was dawning on him that if he didn't do something fast this might be his last opportunity to look.

 

Sam, for his part, kept his eyes away. He looked like he was fighting with himself, somewhere behind his face—the door was still a solid thing between their bodies and Dean couldn't tell whether he wanted to slam it shut or fling it open.

 

“Can I come in?” he asked, knowing that if Sam said _no_ he'd be powerless to do anything but accept it.

 

Now Sam looked at him, and seemed to realise immediately that it was a mistake to do so. His eyes welled up faster than Dean had ever seen them and he shook his head, once, took a deep breath, raised his eyes to the ceiling and then stepped back, pulling the door open as he did.

 

It was a single—nice room, Dean thought, even under the circumstances. Quiet and dimly lit. Old-fashioned headboard, gaudy Southwestern coverlet, the usual fare, even an appropriately-ugly couch, armchair, TV. It looked like he'd hardly had time to set foot inside. His duffel wasn't even open yet, where it sat on the bed.

 

Dean heard Sam close the door behind them. He pulled anxiously at his mouth. His heart was still stuck somewhere in his esophagus and he still didn't have any idea what he was here to do.

 

Sam's eyes were pressing into him like the barrel of a gun up against the back of his neck.

 

“Dad send you?” he asked, terse and sad, coming round him, hands pushed into his pockets. They stood there, awkwardly at angles, looking at each other.

 

Dean shook his head.

 

“Told me not to come,” he said.

 

Sam's mouth twitched a little. “But you did.”

 

Dean took a breath, looked around the room again, finally eased sideways onto the bed, steadying his elbows on his knees.

 

“Sure ain't hard to find.”

 

“Didn't want to be,” Sam said, softly.

 

Silence for a while.

 

“I'm not coming back with you,” said Sam.

 

“I kinda figured,” Dean said, “but I'm an optimist.”

 

Suddenly there were a million things he wanted to say, all boiling up and fighting to get into his mouth, looking at Sam right now, but here was his eternal dilemma again—

 

Sam was the one with the words. Sam was the one who had the courage and the eloquence to say what he meant. He always had. Even when he was six years old he'd had the means to shout out how unfair things were when Dean had always been silent and Dean had been stupefied by the things he'd said on that road up to Utah, unable to tell his own side for three years, because he didn't have that in him, he didn't have Sam's bravery in him, he didn't have Sam's fire. He wanted to be able to blame him for this. He wanted to be able to articulate how it felt to be left behind like this, to know that Sam wanted to leave everything he'd ever had behind and all at the drop of a hat, turning on a dime. He realised suddenly that he didn't even know when Sam was fixing to leave, or how, and it struck him cold to realise that if he'd been a few minutes later maybe he would already be gone, walking the highway towards the west, waiting for someone to give him a lift to California—

 

Sam was waiting for him to speak, he knew, but he couldn't. He just _looked_ at him like a dumbstruck fool, feeling the trembling in his own jaw, wishing to God Sam could just read his mind—it would be so much easier that way.

 

He wanted to laundry-list the reasons why he should stay, why he should reconsider, why he should call Stanford and turn down their full ride. He wanted to shout at him and at the same time he didn't want to shout, he just wanted to talk, just get it out—how if Sam walked away nothing would ever be right again, how if Sam left then where did everything else go? What happened, then, to everywhere they'd been all this time? What happened to the people they had seen, the places they had survived in, the hunger and the poverty and the growing-up, the steady winding road that had been leading out from the night of that fire to this moment here? What happened, then, to the both of them on the road together, knees bumping under the dash, and shitty diner food and one-stoplight towns, and target practise in the snow, and the both of them growing into their skin, getting tanned in the sun and pale in the winter, getting scarred up and beat up and cleaning the blood off each other, whooping and hollering with the windows down, saving lives, inching closer and closer to one another while the sun rose and fell and the Earth turned and the years went until everything slotted into place just right and then whatever happened happened and they were happy in their own strange little fucked-up way, what happened, then, to all of that?

 

He was standing there, six foot two, still just a kid for all his talk, eyes begging for something though Dean didn't know what, and Dean thought about him, for an instant, sitting slouched in the passenger seat, smiling at him all sadness, talking about love, and the moment when he could have made everything right flying by like one mile marker out of millions planted on the side of the road.

 

He stood up. He hesitated. He took Sam's face in his hand and he kissed him.


	15. XV

_Kilgore, Texas_

 

For an instant, he wondered if he had made a terrible mistake—Sam went rigid up against him, standing un-anchored in the middle of the floor, his arms still down at his sides, and Dean pulled back a split second later, still only inches from his brother's face and his wide wet eyes and his mouth open just enough to let a shocked breath out.

 

He froze, afraid to move, feeling the warmth of Sam's lips fading rapidly from his own, and Sam's cheek in the palm of his hand, fitted perfectly there, still—

 

“What are you doing?” Sam said, though it came out mostly breath, and Dean felt something like heat and shame down low in his spine—and his instinct was to shut up, back up, get out—

 

But he'd been doing that for three years and more. He was sick to death and tired of it.

 

“I thought you didn't—” Sam said, fixated on his face, but his body was loosening up and his shoulders were relaxing and he reached up, slowly, to let his fingertips brush against his own lips, trembling.

 

“I know,” Dean said, swallowing hard, “I know, you thought—”

 

Sam laughed, a weird, short, panicked noise. “I gave up—”

 

“I'm sorry,” Dean said, wretched—it felt as if something had given way at the back of his throat, as if some long-held dam had come down. “I know. I'm sorry. You told me—you _told_ me, and I didn't know what to do, so I didn't—but I thought about it—I thought about it for years—and you're my brother, Sammy, and I would die for you and I would do anything for you, you know that, you know that, I would—I would do this if you want it—I want it—”

 

 _I love you more than anyone or anything on this godforsaken Earth and I have since you were still learning to walk with your hand in mine and I will love you any way you want,_ and he didn't have those words yet, not quite yet, but it didn't matter—they were close enough that he thought that maybe Sam could hear it shuttering behind his eyes—

 

“God—can I—” Dean said, choking a little on it, wanting more than anything just to press himself against Sam's mouth again, and Sam nodded furiously, and he did—dragging a hand up into Sam's hair, gripping it, feeling Sam's fingers curl around the fabric of his shirt and pull him into it, pulling them both back against the wall where Sam's head knocked a picture frame out of place but it didn't matter—nothing mattered except the way this felt like letting out a breath he'd been holding all his life.

 

He kissed him and kissed him, rough and slipshod, and their teeth knocked together and Sam's head hit the wall more than once and his hands were against Dean's throat, thumbs stroking aimlessly where his jaw met his skull, and the drywall rough and pinching under Dean's bracing hand, he kissed him and kissed him—until Sam pushed him away a little, abruptly, and everything stopped, and he looked at him.

 

“I'm leaving,” he said, voice all cracked, as if he were just figuring it out. “I'm leaving. I'm leaving tomorrow.”

 

Dean felt his heart go still.

 

“Sam,” he said, desperate, but Sam pushed him off and away, moving sideways and back, scrubbing at his mouth with his hand.

 

There was stillness—Sam stopping in the dimness near the closed-up window where the lamp didn't reach, and Dean, still half-leaning against the wall.

 

His heart slipped out of his throat and into his gut like a stone.

 

Sam was shivering, standing over there, his mouth kiss-pink, staring at him. It was dark in here, but Dean could see the wetness on his face.

 

“I thought this was what you wanted,” Dean said, softly.

 

Sam let out a long breath, lips opening up, his face the saddest he had ever seen.

 

“I'm going,” he said, mouth trembling as if it broke his heart to say it. “I have to. I have to get out. Nothing's gonna keep me here, Dean. Not even you.”

 

They were back again, now, in the silence, in the wordlessness, and Dean stared at him, blank on the inside, sick to his stomach.

 

What was he supposed to do now?

 

Out of the corner of his eye he could see the alarm clock on the nightstand by the bed. Little red numbers flickering over and over. Minutes going by. If anyone passed the room right now, he thought, absently, they'd think it was empty for all their stillness, and all the darkness beneath the door.

 

“Tomorrow,” he said, eventually. The only word that managed to find its way to his tongue.

 

Sam nodded, almost imperceptibly.

 

“Just like that. Tomorrow.” He sank into the armchair at his left, watched Sam turn his face away from him, look down at the place where the carpet met the wall, his fist clenching and unclenching at his side. “And I'm never gonna see you again.”

 

“Don't be stupid,” Sam said, barely even a whisper. He looked an instant from crumpling to the floor.

 

“College is—four years,” Dean said—he heard the words coming from his mouth but it didn't feel as if he were the one speaking them. They were cold and dead and he was—well, he didn't know what he was, not anymore, not right now. “And then you'll—buy a house, I guess, get married—”

 

“Dean.”

 

“Two-point-five kids—just like that.”

 

“I will die,” Sam said, “if I stay here.”

 

“I thought—I mean, maybe I'm just naïve, but—man.” Dean pushed his head down into his hands, shutting up his eyes in the dark. It was easier. “I really thought—”

 

“I wanted you, I still do,” Sam said, somewhere in that blackness, “but I can't pretend you're the end-all be-all, Dean—”

 

“I want you,” Dean said, dropping his hands. “You _are_ my end-all be-all.”

 

“What am I supposed to do?” Sam snapped, suddenly, throwing his arms open. “Tell me what I'm supposed to do, then, because I don't see how this all works out—”

 

“I don't know.”

 

“I don't, either.”

 

“One night?”

 

Sam stopped, arms falling back to his sides, swallowing hard.

 

“What?”

 

“One night. Just tonight.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Just—come with me,” Dean said, getting to his feet, his eyes stinging. “Just tonight. Get a drink, drive around, just—don't leave like this, man, don't just walk out without a goodbye. Give me that much.”

 

Sam was right. There was no solution. There was no compromise here in which they both left happy. And right now—right now, in this moment, what he wanted was to be able to pretend that everything was okay, just for a few more hours, before his whole world walked away from him when the sun rose, because he knew he couldn't stop him.

 

“Please,” he said, and Sam looked at him and closed his eyes and nodded.

* * *

 

Duncan Lake wasn't much to look at, especially not now in the late summer when it was still leaching back from its shores in the grasp of the eternal Texas drought, but it was quiet out there on the spit of land that pushed into it, away from the surrounding neighbourhoods and waterfront properties, just far enough away to still feel the city lights at their backs but escape the noise, the traffic, the population.

 

If he could have, Dean thought, following the precarious dirt road towards the water, he'd have driven another direction, driven and driven with Sam at his side until everything else fell away and they were free of things. But he couldn't.

 

Sam's hand rested on the seat between them, inches from Dean's leg, the whole way. He didn't say much. He just looked out the window, watching the sky go full dark. There was a six-pack rattling around in the footwell next to him and Dean couldn't help but think that it all felt forced to an extent, driving out here to watch the stars and get drunk like lovesick teenagers, but he knew neither of them wanted to stay in that room at the hotel and there was nowhere else to go that wouldn't make them both sick to their stomachs.

 

The air coming off the lake was cool when Dean parked a little ways up from the shore, the Impala tilted ominously with one front wheel against a rock he hadn't been able to avoid. They were probably trespassing on somebody's land, but as soon as the headlights dimmed out he had the feeling that nobody would bother with them here.

 

They sat there a while, in the settling silence.

 

Eventually Sam was the one who moved, popping the door and angling himself out, reaching back in for the beer and then bracing himself against the door-frame to peer back inside at Dean.

 

“You coming out?” he said, and at the very least, Dean thought, he didn't sound like he didn't want to be here, like he felt forced. That was something.

 

Stargazing was never something they planned on doing, and they'd done it more than once, and Dean could remember every individual time with distinct clarity if he chose to—somehow in the last few years there had just been moments where they'd felt the urge to pull off the road into someone's wheat field or a long empty stretch of the desert and lie back on the car's hood and just look up, for a while, and feel their own smallness, and their closeness, and they'd never spoken of it afterward. And Duncan Lake was a terrible place for stargazing; there were too many trees and too much light pollution to open up the sky; but that almost felt alright, on a night like tonight. If anything went too perfectly, just when nothing was going right, it would feel like some last cosmic laugh.

 

So they sat on the hood and watched the lake instead, and didn't talk—there was nothing to talk about that would do either of them good. Watched the lights of the marina across the water ripple and reform, watched the windows in the houses on the opposite side go dark. When Dean looked down at Sam's bare arm, resting across his thigh, there was gooseflesh on it, and the wind that came in off the lake was cold for an August night.

 

There were night bugs singing in the trees, and the warm metal smell of the day cooling off the world, and the barest sliver of the moon just overhead, and Dean sat there with him—looking more at the angle of Sam's body against the Impala's windshield than the water, trying to memorise the way his throat moved when he drank, and this time, here, when Sam caught him looking, and looked back, Dean didn't try to pretend he hadn't been. As sad as he felt, as hurt and upset as he felt, they'd kissed not an hour ago, and it was liberating—he could look, now, and not feel the shame that had always come with it before.

 

Besides, whispered a little voice in the back of his head, this wasn't going to last much longer. It was all going to fall apart again when the night was over and then—

 

“I'm sorry,” Sam said, abruptly, cutting through his thoughts, and Dean blinked, pulling his eyes up from the folds of Sam's shirt against his chest to his face. His profile was blue and black out here in the dark. He swallowed. “I'm sorry I—sprang all this on you like I did. I should have thought it through.”

 

“It's okay,” Dean said, and it was. Maybe it wouldn't be, when he thought about it more, but for now he didn't want to feel angry.

 

“You have to know—you're not the problem, Dean, and I'm not—I'm not running away from _you.”_

 

“Well—I mean, you are,” Dean said, flatly, looking down into his bottle. “Maybe you're not meaning to, but you are.”

 

“But you're not the reason. You know?” He could feel Sam's eyes on his face, the edge of Sam's hand against his thigh, where it hadn't been a moment before. “Don't—just don't go thinking you're the reason. That's all.”

 

“So—I'm not the reason you're going, but I ain't reason enough to stay behind.”

 

Sam pulled his hand away, locked it safely around his bottle where it dangled between his pulled-up knees.

 

“I just don't get it,” Dean said, tipping his head back against the Impala's roof. “I get why you wanna leave, and I get that you never liked the way we lived, but I just—I dunno, man. I guess I just never really thought you'd have it in you to walk away.”

 

Sam didn't say anything.

 

“Maybe it's—I dunno. The one thing that I knew above everything else growing up was that family—you never, ever walked away from family. Family was all you had, family was the only thing that stuck, and I lived by that. And I guess you just—you just don't see it that way.”

 

The trees hushed and tossed in the wind and then fell back again.

 

“I don't know how to make you understand,” Sam said, very quietly.

 

The light went out again. The whole world back to sleep.

 

Sam's hands were rubbing anxiously over his knees, long-fingered. The scar on his knuckle from four years back. Dean wanted to touch them.

 

“Would you even consider—” Dean said, but then he stopped.

 

Sam didn't move, didn't nod or shake his head, just sat there looking out.

* * *

 

They left when the beer ran out, when there were no more lights to look at on the water, and drove back to the America's Best Value Inn in silence, just the way they'd gone; but Sam let his hand rest on Dean's thigh, biting his lip the whole way, squeezing it a little every now and then, pushing dangerously close against the inside, and halfway there Dean reached down to put his own hand over it, and tried to let the passing streetlamps blur out across his eyes.

* * *

 

By the time the door of Room 53 closed and latched behind them there was no question of it anymore.

 

Sam reached out from where he came in behind him and took hold of his forearm and that—that was it. That was the last spark Dean needed in his belly where a heat had been coiling all night ever since his lips had touched Sam's for the first time and before he was really aware of making the decision to do so he turned, took Sam's pretty thin-boned face in his hands and kissed him, hard, and Sam reached up between his arms to hold his face, too, and it was dead, dead silent in this room, as if it had been waiting for them to come back, silent as the grave and maybe it was that, for some part of them, but Dean kissed him, both of them stumbling backwards a little, losing their way in the absolute darkness, and Sam pulled back only for an instant, breath hot against Dean's mouth, to whisper, “Do you really—”

 

“Well, I mean—do you?” Dean asked, because right now there was nothing he wanted more in the world than to get his hands on Sam, on every part of him he'd ever seen but been unable to touch, and Sam laughed, as if it were the most ludicrous question he'd ever been asked, and he nodded, whispered, “Yes,” hands clinging desperately to Dean's shirt-front, and they almost ran into the stupid partition between the couch and the bed and crashed to the floor, Sam laughing low in his throat, legs tangled up with Dean's, and they sat there on the floor in the dark with their faces inches from one another, Sam's back pushing the coffee table out of whack—

 

There was a split second where Dean looked at what little of Sam's face he could see in the thin sliver of outside light and he thought—this was Sam—this was his little brother—and he'd been waiting years for something like this; he had pined and made distance and hatched all these plans to get away from what he'd known could never have possibly been his—but now here they were, and mostly Dean was trying to understand why he hadn't kissed Sam years ago, the minute he turned eighteen, because Sam wasn't soft like girls and he wasn't rough like boys—he was Sam; he was everything—and in that instant Dean loved him so much he thought he might burst.

 

He dropped his hands down to the hem of Sam's shirt and rucked it up and Sam shifted, lifted his arms to pull it over his head, and the shadows fell so gracefully in the hollows of his collarbone and throat and Dean couldn't help but kiss them, and kiss them again, pulling gently at the skin with his teeth until Sam gave a little whimper and set his own hands to work on the buttons of Dean's plaid and then it was occurring to Dean how cold it was in here because his chest was bare and Sam's hands were flat against it, and he was looking down wonderingly at it, at the tiny glint of the amulet against Dean's sternum, and trailing the palms of his hands down Dean's skin as if he'd never seen it before—and he hadn't, really; not like this; not when his own skin was bare to push against it—and he did, pushing Dean back up the partition, warm and solid up against him, ducking his head down to kiss him like some ferocious little insatiable beast—

 

It was like catching movement in a strobe light, trying to find one another like that, fumbling in the meagre blue parking lot glow for each other, hints and glimpses of eyes and wet lips and the cool round edges of shoulders, and Dean felt, as Sam pushed against him again the better to crush their lips together, how hard Sam was already against his leg, and shit—if he wasn't about to fuck his baby brother right here on this hotel floor—

 

In the confusion they happened to topple sideways away from the wall and then Sam was on his back and shit—shit—this was really happening—

 

“Fuck,” Dean said, freezing suddenly, halfway between Sam's spread legs. “Shit, man, I don't have—”

 

“May,” Sam gasped, “or may not have lube in my duffel—”

 

Dean wheezed a shocked sort of laugh and rolled off him, scrambling up towards the bed and unzipping the bag so hard it nearly broke. “Dude.”

 

“Scout's Motto,” Sam said, grinning, his teeth bright in the dark.

 

Dean found it and stumbled back, kneeling down between Sam's thighs—he was shaking, they both were, and Dean wasn't sure why, but he paused for an instant, looking down at him in whatever neon was coming in beneath the curtains.

 

“Shit,” he breathed, letting a hand trail up over Sam's thigh, still a thin layer of denim between him and flesh. “Shit, Sammy.” He was laid out like every dream Dean had tried so hard to convince himself he'd never had, chest and stomach dotted with little dark moles, breathing hard, hips rolling upward slowly every so often looking for friction, hair all scattered in his eyes.

 

Sam reached up, gripped his shoulders, pulled him down, kissed him again—all the frenzy shaken out of him now, just slowness—and Dean let their foreheads rest together, tasting the hazy reminder of alcohol on Sam's breath, ran a slow hand down his brother's side, thumb flicking over Sam's nipple, and _that_ made Sam groan and arch his back and _that_ sent shudders rippling down Dean's spine and straight to his dick.

 

Sam's hands slid south, fumbled for the button and fly of his jeans, and Dean let him work them undone, let him slip his fingers into the waistline and push them down the curve of Dean's ass, and when Sam saw his cock bobbing up against his stomach he let out a shaky sort of moan.

 

“You sure you're okay?” Dean rasped, concerned and out of breath already, and Sam nodded so hard his head bounced off the floor, pushed up his hips to undo his own jeans with his fluttery hands.

 

“Shit,” Sam breathed, shoving off his clothes like he had somewhere to be, and Dean rocked to the side to let him kick off his jeans and when he rocked back he looked down between them and very nearly moaned himself.

 

“Damn, brother,” he said, more shakily than he'd have liked to admit, because Sam was hard as hell, precome smearing against his stomach, and without really thinking about it Dean shifted down and hesitated, hovering there, just above the head.

 

Sam groaned, biting down hard on his lower lip, looking like it was taking all his strength not to push his hips right up into Dean's face, and hell if it wasn't the prettiest thing Dean had ever seen—

 

He kissed the base of Sam's cock and a shiver hurtled through Sam's body and he curled up enough to clutch at Dean's shoulders so Dean kissed a little higher, and a little more, and licked a line right up to the head and Sam gave a desperate, reedy noise, and it had been a year or more since Dean had sucked cock but oh there was nothing that sounded better in the world—

 

But Sam stopped him before he could, grabbed his face up and kissed him, whimpered “Not tonight,” against his mouth and maybe Dean's head was just full of his own rushing blood but it sounded almost like a _next time_ and maybe something a little like hope rose further in his chest than it had all day and so he nodded, and Sam lay back down, pulled his knees up, reached between them to push one finger in a lazy circle around the rim of his hole and ground his lip between his teeth and _looked_ at Dean, looked _into_ him with those crazy fox-fire eyes and if Dean Winchester had ever been stricken dumb in his life, now was the moment.

 

It took a good few fingers to open Sam up and by the time he was ready he was absolutely wrecked, clutching desperately at the amulet still dangling around Dean's neck, legs hooked up beneath Dean's arms and tears in his eyes from the pain but every time Dean paused to ask if he was alright he hissed “Yes, yes, please—” And Dean was terrified that he was hurting him, hadn't thought to ask if Sam had ever done this before, but Sam pushed himself down on Dean's fingers as if he would die without them and he looked as if he was going to come the moment Dean's cock touched his body and so Dean kept going, sucking kisses onto Sam's collarbone to soothe him, his head on fire with how insane, how absolutely insane this was—

 

But for whatever reason—stars aligning, luck, the way Dean knew Sam's body almost as well as he knew his own—they were moving together like a well-oiled machine and Dean had had a lot of sex in his life but never quite as _right_ as this—if fucking his little brother on a motel room floor at one in the morning could be _right_ at all—

 

He reached up, pushed his fingers through Sam's against the carpet before he pushed the head of his cock inside and Sam froze as soon as he did, his whole body tightening up, and his mouth fell open but no sound came out, and his fingers were gripping Dean's so tightly that even in the darkness his knuckles stood out white as snow.

 

And then it was slow—then it was slow, somehow, and Dean eased his way inside, as gently as he could, feeling Sam clench around him, and out again, watching his face go wide and blank and his eyes roll back when he hit that sweet spot inside him, and abruptly all Dean knew how to do was roll his hips again and again and feel completely the way Sam was coming undone all around him, muscles trembling in his thighs and his stomach, pink mouth open, begging to be kissed, clutching Dean's hand so hard Dean thought his bones might break in his grip.

 

The only sound that existed in the world was the sound of their skin sliding against one another's skin and the sound of Sam's breathing and the rush of Dean's blood in his ears and the rasp of the carpet beneath Sam's body in endless rising repetitive motion and it wasn't perfect, it was too much too fast but it was what they needed now and the only thing that Dean could see was the curve of Sam's ribcage upwards toward him and how easy it was to kiss and how many places there were to let his lips rest and for a split second he suddenly remembered that this was over, that this would never, ever last, that Sam was still going to leave him, and it seemed like the most cruel ridiculous thing in the world, to think about that right now—

 

“Dean,” Sam whimpered, lifting his head up suddenly, “Dean—Dean—”

 

He came without warning, with a shocked little sound, without Dean even touching his cock, and slammed his hands down on Dean's shoulders, spine curling up, shuddering through it, and Dean hurled all those thoughts from his mind and kissed him hard, trying to lose everything but this, Sam gasping into his mouth, toes curling at the small of Dean's back, and when he opened his eyes and looked right into Dean's it was done, and Dean pulled out and came between Sam's legs and gave a shuddering gasp and let his head drop against Sam's shoulder.

 

For a minute they sat there, Sam half-upright, breathing hard and hoarse, as if they'd stunned themselves into silence; and then Sam made a kind of terrified noise and grabbed up at Dean's back, clutching him close to him, chin against Dean's neck, and he held him like that, as if he knew somehow that Dean needed to be held, as if he had nothing else in the world, as if he were going to fall apart unless he clung to something now.

* * *

 

Sam turned on a lamp, eventually. He was sitting naked on the bed with a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker on the counter-top when Dean came out of the shower.

 

“Coffee? Three in the morning?” Dean said, cocking an eyebrow, kicking aimlessly at their discarded clothes on the floor until his boxers appeared and pulling them on.

 

Sam shrugged, put the cup down.

 

Dean dropped down on the bed beside him, flat on top the coverlet, looking up at the ceiling.

 

“When I came looking for you,” he said, stretching his arms up above his head, “this is not what I was expecting.”

 

Sam laughed, a private sort of sound, in the back of his mouth. Dean could feel his eyes roving over his body.

 

“Dad's gonna kill you,” he said softly.

 

“I know.”

 

They lay there for a while, together, in some mode of peace, the air conditioner going on and off every once in a while, the occasional slash of traffic on the streets outside.

 

Dean turned his head towards the clock on the nightstand—it was edging on 3:20 AM, and he had no hope of getting back to the house on the county road tonight, not exhausted as he was.

 

And maybe, he thought, swallowing hard, feeling that indomitable little flicker of hope inside him again, maybe—if he lay here long enough, if they both fell asleep like this, maybe everything would be okay; they would have lasted the night, passed the test, and he could drive out of here in the cool August morning, sun still grey on the empty highway, early rainclouds on the edge of the sky, and he could take Sam with him, and they could pick up doughnuts in some little shop somewhere and breathe the air before it was filled with exhaust and birdsong—it didn't feel too impossible, right now, in the quiet, with Sam's warm breathing body next to his, and all there to touch if he wanted to, his to love and hold after so many years of goddamn waiting for no reason at all.

 

If they could just sleep until morning everything would be fine. He knew it.

 

“I'm exhausted, man,” he said, letting out a long breath, still looking at the clock.

 

“Dean.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Sam hesitated. Dean could hear him picking at the stitching on the coverlet. The clock slipped over into 3:27.

 

“Will you drive me to the bus station tomorrow?”

 

His voice was tenuous and horrible.

 

Just like that.

 

Dean sat up, slowly, and looked at him, unsure, exactly, why he was so surprised, why he felt so cold.

 

“What?”

 

Sam wouldn't look at him. His cheek was pressed against his folded-up knee and his long fingers were pulling the thread from the fabric, slowly, surely.

 

“We just—” Dean began, very nearly lost for words, but Sam cut him off.

 

“You knew I was leaving when we did,” he said, voice strained.

 

Dean laughed in disbelief. His head felt like it was full of flies, buzzing, crashing around in there. “Even after all of that,” he said, pitch rising, “after all of that, you've got the gall to ask me—”

 

“Don't.”

 

“You can't—I thought—”

 

“What?” Sam said, snapping his head around, his face so full of anger that it nearly struck Dean dumb. “You only fucked me to get me to stay?”

 

Silence.

 

It was a little like watching buildings crumble from a long, long way away, Dean thought, in the part of his mind that wasn't filling up with hurt. All the dust clouding up in great plumes and no sound at all except the very distant _boom,_ somewhere underneath the sound of one's heartbeat, so faint, so woven into the noise of the world that it hardly existed at all.

 

“How could you think that?” Dean said, though it hardly made it past his teeth with the tightness of his jaw, the heat coming up into his face. “Don't you think that. Don't you dare.”

 

“That's all you wanted when you came here,” Sam said, calm and awful as death, stare unwavering. “Yeah? Do whatever it took to drag me back home again.”

 

“Don't you dare.”

 

“Tell me that's not it,” Sam said. “Tell me that's not the smallest bit of why you stuck your dick in me—”

 

“I want you to come _home_ ,” Dean said, or snapped, he wasn't sure, “but that—”

 

But he fell silent, then.

 

Sam's eyes were full of tears and his mouth was a hard angry line and Dean knew, then, even if it didn't register completely past the blood roaring in his ears. Sam knew it was bullshit. He knew very well that there had been nothing ulterior on that floor between their bodies but he had to say it, he had to push, he had to snap everything in half or else he wouldn't be able to pull himself out of Dean's hands any more than Dean would be able to let him go.

 

It was terrible, and sick, and wrong, and for an instant he hated him—hated him for letting even that smallest bit of hope flare up in Dean's chest, for owning his right to be selfish, and it was enough.

 

“Yeah,” he said, flat, quietly, voice shaking, lip curling. “I'll drive you to the bus station in the morning.”

 

Sam nodded, almost imperceptibly, and turned his body away into the lamplight, and ducked his head down between his shoulders, and was still.

* * *

 

They were like that, still, when the sun rose.

 

And they didn't say a word to one another while they dressed, pulling on the clothes they'd left on the floor, jeans and boxers still smelling of sex, and Dean didn't say a word when Sam closed the passenger seat door, Greyhound bus ticket clutched tight in his hands. And they didn't say a word as they pulled out of the America's Best Value Inn in the grey morning light, easing onto the frontage roads as six AM rolled over, only a few early morning commuters to break up the drive. And they didn't say a word when Dean found the Greyhound station on East South Street and pulled up the curb.

 

He said nothing when Sam hesitated in the passenger seat, his mouth crumpling like discarded paper, and when he covered his face with his hands for a moment, shoulders shuddering quietly, panicky awful little-boy tears. He didn't say anything when Sam dropped them and took a deep sucking breath and opened the door and hauled his duffel bag over his shoulder and closed the door again and walked towards the signpost against the street.

 

He didn't make a sound when the bus arrived and Sam stepped onto it and the doors closed behind him.

 

He hardly even blinked when Sam, at the last possible moment before the Impala slid out of his line of sight from the seat he had taken at the back of the bus, turned his head to look, and was gone a moment later—face obliterated by the sun against the flat of the tempered glass, and the bus groaned away, and he was left alone in the idling car on the side of the road with no stirring living thing for miles.

 

Just like that.

 

He drove back, obeying the speed limit, the radio off. He drove back to the house on the county road and he parked around back by Dad's truck and he went in the screen door.

 

Dad was sitting at the table where they'd been cleaning guns the night before, and he looked up when Dean came in, and he didn't say anything, either. Just looked at him, and Dean stood there in the doorway and looked right back for a moment, and then he kept walking in—walked into the back room, and sat down on his cot, and stared out into the hole in the wall, at the darkness of the trees back there, the darkness of the big yawning gaping world stretching ahead of him without his brother, and he didn't make a sound when he began to cry, either.

 

Not a single sound.


	16. XVI

_Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

He left. Work let out at half-past six and he gathered up his tools, slung them into the back of his truck, pulled off from the site and drove, straight past the exit back to Lisa's house, straight onto the highway.

 

He didn't even know it was happening until he was already there, coursing silently down the right-hand lane towards the blank grey expanse of the road, the radio off, the end-of-day commuters merging in and out around him; he couldn't recall actually making the decision. Probably because there was no decision to be made; he had tried everything else, and leaving was the only thing left; there had always been clarity on the road. And there was nothing for him in that house. Just two people he had only served to constantly disappoint who deserved better than him.

 

It was hard to see straight, more so today than ever, as if something were pressing against his eyes from behind. Memory was pounding at his skull, migraine-thick, sharper and more painful than ever before, but less vivid now, less detailed—more a running stream of colour on the insides of his eyelids, like the auras Lisa sometimes got before headaches. His stomach felt ready to heave itself inside out any minute so he left, because there would be no weathering it on that suburban street. He had to ride it out somewhere where no one could see how much it hurt and how much it wanted to kill him.

 

The highway got to be too much too soon, too many license plates and swerving lights; he pulled off onto the first county road he could find, familiar two-lane asphalt, heading in what direction he didn't know, but off somewhere quiet into the trees and the farmland and the sky. He was well and truly lost within a half hour.

 

In the cupholder his phone began to vibrate, rattling against the plastic. He didn't need to look at the screen to know who was calling. It rattled and clattered again and again until it began to get dark, and then it stopped, and all was the rush of the road underneath him and the quiet and the voices and the smears of light inside his head.

 

( _Nights alone up in Vermont in the summer and the darkness with your thumb above the Call button on your phone, wondering if he'd pick up, needing to hear him, needing to know that he was still capable of laughter way out on the other side of the world, needing to feel the catch and drag of his voice on your skin._ )

 

Dean blinked, shuddered, reaching down to flip on his headlights. His phone was flashing on and off with God-knew-how-many voicemails. He'd forgotten how fast night could fall, when it really set its mind to it.

 

( _That week you spent above that girl's bar in Kentucky when you were too sick and too far away to call Dad for help and you puked on her couch and you cried for your brother._ )

 

Sometimes the streetlamps, where there were streetlamps, blurred together in slow motion, kite-tails of light seething backwards into the sky.

 

( _Thanksgiving week of his sophomore fall when you heard his voice for the last time before Dad vanished all those years later and he told you over voicemail that he loved you—he made the Honour List and he loved you—he was meeting a girl this Friday and he loved you—no matter where you were he loved you—_ )

 

He must have driven through a dozen towns like neon flashes set back off the road, tired old beacons still lifting their faces up against the stars, and he could have stopped in any one of them but for the fact that all of them felt as if he'd been there before—

 

( _He missed you so much but he was doing well and he hoped you'd quit smoking and he hoped you were alright, at least as much as it was possible for you to be alright, and he loved you._ )

 

Halfway between Warsaw and Plymouth—how he managed to find his way up here, he didn't know—he rumbled off into the ditch and pushed the passenger door open and retched into the grass, sick stinging acid, and hunched there in the open space, shivering, squinting his eyes shut to try and blind out the noise, but it only seemed to swell, hammer at his temples like a rain of nails.

 

Somehow he made it to Winamac. In the end it didn't matter where he landed, so long as he was gone.

* * *

 

The woman at the front desk of the Indian Head Motel looked like she was more inclined to call him an ambulance than check him into a room, but she did it anyway.

 

Ride it out. He just had to ride it out. That was all he could think. He could barely get the keycard into the slot for the room—ground floor, easy exits, old habits—without swaying dangerously on his feet, black flecks shimmering and flickering in the corners of his eyes. ( _Two years after that you spent without him. How the fuck did you manage then?_ ) It was a double—he couldn't be sure that was an accident—it was a double with horrible brick-red bed-spreads and mattresses that looked akin to rocks but at least it was solid ground beneath his feet. ( _Two years you drove around and drank yourself sick and missed him like a fire in your chest and the night that Dad left on that trip, the night that Dad headed out and you knew in your gut something was about to go wrong, something was about to come crumbling down again, you were almost relieved that you didn't have to_ wait _anymore to crash back into him—_ )

 

There couldn't be that much left, could there? There couldn't be that many more years to stumble through, mute and impotent, watching it all careen by and fuck up and go wrong the second time around, couldn't be that many more flashes of Sam's face and the smell of his skin to torture himself with—

 

He didn't even make it into the bathroom in time before he was vomiting again, more into the bathtub than the toilet, and nothing was even coming up, really—just bile—but his stomach was lurching and he felt like he was going to die, he was going to curl up and die on this half-assed tile floor that was making his ears ring with the stench of bleach. Someone had shoved a crowbar under his ribs and was yanking them all out of place, snapping them off, twisting and squeezing his heart in their hands—that's what it felt like— ( _The night you broke in to his apartment like some common criminal because it felt easier than ringing the doorbell, felt more like_ you, _and you needed that—needed to get ahold of yourself so that maybe when he saw you he'd still love you just the same—_ )

 

Funny, but he'd always thought he'd go out a little bloodier, and a little less of a goddamn broken heart.

 

He wanted liquor. He didn't want liquor; it would only make the nausea worse. Maybe he was cursed, after all—maybe all of this had just been some slow, agonising hex-bag torture and he was going to retch his guts out on this floor and all the pain would have been for nothing—why else would this be happening? Why else wouldn't it _stop_?

 

( _And the way he looked at you when he put his arm around his girlfriend—lovely Jessica—and the way your heart leapt when you saw him bend towards her the way he'd always bent towards you—he loved her and you didn't have an ounce of jealousy in you—immediately, you loved her too—you thought,_ lucky girl—do you know how lucky you are, pretty girl, that you get to be loved by him?)

 

He hauled himself up by the edge of the tub and spat into the sink, bracing his arm against the doorframe, head like a ton of bricks on his shoulders. Maybe if he lay down—

 

But as soon as he shifted his body down onto the bed it was as if something huge detached and slid rapidly across the planes in his head, louder, brighter ( _the smell of her on fire and your heart rat-a-tat-tatting four years old again and hauling him out, out_ ) and he couldn't help but moan, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes and rolling sideways on the rock-hard mattress ( _Sam curled up like that muffling his sobs with his hands and you said_ we don't have to stay for the funeral _and he covered up his whole head with his arms, like a little boy, you thought, hiding from the monsters under the blankets, and how you held him_ ) and wanting to miraculously meet unconsciousness somehow just to feel everything stop—

 

Ride it out—

 

But how was he supposed to ride it out when he _knew_ where it was going and the only place it would end would be right here, trapped in it, with _nothing_ to show for it, nothing in the world except the complete and total absence of Sam and the torture of time passing and it was never going to get better, he knew that now, he wasn't trying to fool himself anymore, it was _never_ going to stop, and there would always be new ways to miss him and new ways to grieve and could anyone really blame him for having seen his whole world leap to his death and be here, now, like this? He wanted to scream in their faces, _you have never known a pain like mine, you have never, ever known a pain like mine—_

 

( _Two states out from the Pierpont Inn and he said_ remember what you promised me _for the twenty-fifth time and you pulled off the road, you turned full in your seat to face him and said_ look at me, Sammy—so help me God, as long as you live, I am going to keep you safe—if you need saving I will save you, do you hear me? _That_ is what I'm gonna promise you. _And he turned his face away and you knew he didn't believe you but he still made you say it again, against his skin that night, made you promise it right into his mouth._ )

 

He was dead. Sam was _dead._ It made him _laugh._ He raked his fingers up through his hair and choked on it, weak, pathetic, sobbing laughter—how absurd was that? That Sam was dead and he was still drowning in him—no, no, that was the problem—death was too final for someone like Sam, death didn't fit him right, forget everything else that came afterward, no—and what would happen when _he_ died, here, maybe, when his head was done splitting itself apart? Heaven—a Heaven with no Sam in it, so what was it then?

 

( _Sex on Christmas Eve, Ypsilanti, months before your body was torn to shreds, and Sam so sure it was the last Christmas you'd ever have, and you realised that night how often Sam clutched at your body when you were like that, skin to skin, as if he was afraid one or the other of you might be torn away, shivering like a freezing animal._ )

 

An empty July field and the acrid smell of smoke and the absence of a laugh.

 

 _(Four weeks out of Hell and Sam had secrets between his teeth while he lay between your legs, fingers idle on your chest, saying_ you had one here, I remember, _kissing the place in the hook of your hipbone where scars had vanished under Castiel's light,_ and here, _a delicate line below your collarbone,_ I miss them, _he said,_ I miss them.)

 

And the highway to the Garden falling to pieces, ending abruptly at some empty Sinclair station, ruin and rust and no postcards on the rack inside, and he would be there wondering who even bothered to build this dead road because there was only desert out that way, a one-way street, and there was no going back in a Heaven like that, there was no going home—he would still be dead.

 

( _Sam screaming, Sam's throat tearing up with pain inside the panic room while his veins wrung themselves dry. You, standing outside, listening, because you could at least bear that much of his hurt. You thought about how you'd touched him while that sick black stuff ran through him and it made you feel cold and sick to think that your brother's body which you'd raised so painstakingly was rotting from the inside on your watch._ I'm sorry, Sammy, _you whispered to yourself like a rosary decade,_ I'm sorry, _but he couldn't hear you, so it didn't count. How did you live with yourself? How did you stand it, man?_ )

 

He was going to scream. He could feel it building up inside his throat.

 

( _His fist in your jacket while the floor split and the light swelled and the ringing in your ears crescendoed and you heard him calling your name beneath the cathedral roar._ )

 

He heaved again though there was nothing left to heave up—curled over the edge of the bed gasping, clutching his stomach, his whole body hot, his heart hammering, his head cleaving in two—

 

( _I-35 and buzzing lights and red rock cliffs and mountain passes, strays and hitchhikers and dime-store machines, Swiss Army knives and Great Lakes, starving and freezing and radio sermons and you walked behind him for every moment of it and you loved him, you loved him, you loved him more than anyone or anything and then—he walked away—_ )

* * *

 

(Last night on Earth, _you said, hoping he could take it as a joke, hoping he wouldn't see how terrified you were._ How you wanna spend it?

 

 _And he shook his head, all quiet and soft, all pulled up into himself, and you'd not seen him so scared since the morning he stepped on that godforsaken Greyhound bus._ I don't know, _he said._ I think I just want to be here.

 

 _So you held him and you hummed James Taylor in his ear because you knew he liked it, still, even then, and you didn't tell him you were proud of him, and you didn't tell him that you had always, always been proud of him, and you didn't tell him that he deserved more than a death like this, and you didn't tell him that you loved him, because a part of you still believed that God would be gracious and give you this one thing, and you remembered being eight years old with him and weaving magic spells in someone's wheat field out in Nebraska, playing with hollowed-out animal bones in the dirt with the grey sky overhead, saying_ we're gonna live forever, Sammy, we're gonna live forever now—

 

_He told you to be happy. He begged you with his back to you and his hand against his mouth. You swore you would._

 

 _You goddamn liar._ )


	17. XVII

_Winamac, Indiana_

_Present Day_

 

Dean opened his eyes.

 

The air conditioner was chugging away below the window, cold thick air cresting in swathes over his face, his arms, his outflung legs. The green light of the smoke detector above his head blinked, slowly, in rhythm.

 

It was all gone.

 

No—it wasn't gone so much as it was fallen back from behind his eyes. There was still the gentle scratching of Sam's fingers in the back of his skull if he listened hard enough to the scraping sound against his bones.

 

He was cold, suddenly—chilled—and abruptly he felt something shift in the room and instinct snapped into place. He froze.

 

His head was too sluggish to be of any real use, and he had no gun underneath the pillow he was lying on, so he did the only thing that made sense; he reached up for the switch on the flat lamp above the bed.

 

He had a sick feeling he knew who it was, anyway.

 

The light came on. It hardly reached past the edge of the bed. It didn't matter.

 

He could see him.

 

This time Dean didn't speak—didn't panic, didn't start. He sat very still, facing straight ahead, and Sam just within his line of sight, just like every other time.

 

This time, Dean just looked.

 

He was ravaged. Destroyed. Broken in more places than one. He could see bone. He could see hair matted with blood and wide eyes set back deep in his skull, watching him. Cheekbones hollow. Mouth sewn up. Standing. Wavering.

 

It wasn't him. When he turned his head there would be no one there. But whether he was cursed, or sick in the head, whether he was being tricked or simply _wanting_ too hard—at least—

 

He wanted to tell him—even if it was only a hallucination—he wanted to tell him everything he'd been too stupid to say when he'd had the chance, if for no other satisfaction than to be able to say it to his suffering face—

 

He closed his eyes instead.

 

The scratching fingers in the back of his head, slowly, slowly, pulled away; and the heaviness in him fell to the bottom of his skull, and he felt the apparition leave like a last breath.

 

He was alone again.

* * *

 

There was a knock on the door at six AM, just as the sun was making itself known, greyly.

 

Dean sat up. He stayed there on the edge of the bed, shoulders bowed, unable to move, until the knock came again, a little louder.

 

He didn't bother with the peephole.

 

Castiel was standing on the stoop, looking as harried as it was possible for Cas to look. His jaw was tight when he saw Dean's numb, sleep-hazed face. He looked hard at him for a moment, blue eyes darting over him, like a robot collecting data.

 

“May I come in?” he said. It sounded more like a statement than a request.

 

Dean turned away from the door. He didn't close it, but he didn't open it, either.

 

He heard the angel come inside and shut the door.

 

“What are you doing here?” Dean said. He didn't feel the point in turning to look at him. His voice came out a croak, harsh and hoarse. He'd probably torn up his throat well and good with all the pointless vomiting the night before.

 

“Lisa called,” Cas said.

 

That, at least, made a little bit of surprise stir in Dean's chest. He turned his head.

 

“She did?”

 

“Prayed, rather.” Cas tilted his head, as if the better to see Dean completely. “She's an intelligent woman.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“She's very worried about you,” Cas said. “She says you never made it home from work. Frankly, I'm beginning to worry, too.” The angel looked around the room, clinically; Dean had a feeling he didn't miss the sick on the edge of the bathtub from this angle. “What are you doing in a place like this?”

 

“Having the time of my life,” Dean sighed, “naturally.” His head swam, and his stomach was beginning to take unkindly to his being upright again. He sank into the armchair beside the bed, curling forward, holding his head above his knees.

 

“You've been sick,” Cas said. “What's wrong?”

 

“Search me, man, I don't know. I don't know anymore.”

 

“You're a long way from the Braedens' house.”

 

“So I gathered.”

 

“Why are you here?”

 

“Jesus, Cas, did you come down here because Lisa called or to play Twenty Questions?” Dean snapped, raising his head only long enough to shoot Cas a weary glare before he had to drop it again.

 

Cas was quiet for a long time, still standing there in his fucking coat, looking at him.

 

“I'm riding it out,” Dean rasped eventually, “okay?”

 

He could almost feel Cas frowning. “Riding out,” the angel repeated. “The memories.”

 

Dean could only manage a groan in response. He had a feeling if he opened his mouth the only thing that would come out was bile. At least his head wasn't screaming so much anymore.

 

“I didn't realise they were bad enough to need to be ridden out,” Cas said.

 

Dean nodded. His hands were shaking. He could feel them, against his temples.

 

“Dean,” Cas said, very softly, “this has to stop.”

 

“I don't know how to make it stop,” Dean said, feeling his eyes getting hot and wet and his whole body going weak again. “I don't know how.”

 

“I think you do,” Castiel said.

 

“No. I don't.”

 

“Dean.”

 

“No—”

 

“You promised.”

 

Dean lashed out, sideways, hand meeting the first thing that could be flung to the floor—the telephone—it crashed onto the carpet and broke, plastic pieces jumping away, the wire ripped out of the wall.

 

“How is it fair?” he shouted, surging to his feet even though his chest seized and his stomach dropped, “How was it fair of him to make me promise that? What gave him the right to ask me to do this? None of this, none of it is fair, Cas, and I didn't—I never got to say—”

 

He pushed a hand back through his hair, trying so hard not to burst apart, feeling angry awful tears begin to squeeze out of his eyes and down his face, and Cas just stood there like a goddamn fool in his stupid fucking coat, watching him, head lifted in surprise and eyes big with sadness—and something deep down in Dean hurtled upwards and exploded from his mouth the way nothing important ever had when it had ever counted before and he was saying it, finally, he was saying it—

 

“What kind of a death was that, huh? What kind of an ending was that? He didn't even get to have a life first! All he had—all he got was a bunch of moments, just bad things, and he never got to see who he was, he never got to love himself the way I loved him—all he had was a collection of bad things and then dying, and I'm here—he wanted to go to school, and he—he wanted to be a kid, and eat popsicles, and draw pictures, and he wanted to have a dog, and a mom, and a house to grow up in, and he never got any of it, do you see that? Do you see what he got? He got busted up and thrown around and he got pushed and pulled and used by you and me and everybody else and then he _died,_ Cas, he _died,_ and that can't be fair—he should have lived forever, he should have been so happy, and I never told him, I never told him how much he _meant_ —”

 

He was aware, vaguely, that Cas was moving towards him. It was hard to see past the blur of everything.

 

“I taught him how to tie his shoes,” he sobbed, screaming it, desperately, trying to make him understand, trying to make him _see_ , “ _I_ did that, it was _me—_ ”

 

He was on the edge of the bed, sunken, collapsed. The smell of Jimmy Novak's coat against his face. Arms were holding him, and they weren't the arms he wanted, but he needed them enough to curl his fingers up against them and cling. With all the strength he had left in him, he held on.

* * *

 

There was water on the nightstand when he woke again, and someone had taken off his boots and pulled the coverlet over him.

 

He didn't want to sit up, but he did, levering himself up on his arms. Thank God there was no rush of sickness to his stomach again.

 

He took a drink of water, and then set it down, and slowly drew a hand across his eyes. His face was tight where his tears had dried. It must have been afternoon by the paleness of the curtains.

 

Cas was sitting in a chair across the room, very quietly. He didn't blink when Dean finally looked his way.

 

Dean swallowed, his throat dry, and let his eyes wander a minute, too exhausted to think. His head was cloudy, but at least it was quiet.

 

“You put me to bed?” he said. Then he coughed; he didn't seem to have much voice left.

 

“You looked like you needed rest,” said Castiel.

 

He got up out of his chair, and came over, hesitantly, to the bed, and he sat down on the edge opposite Dean, and Dean looked at him—fierce, quiet little Cas. He was tempted to ask why the hell the angel cared so much, but he didn't. It was nice enough, now, to know simply that he did.

 

Cas peered down at the floor, as if gathering his thoughts, and then he said, quietly, “You did this to yourself.”

 

Dean swallowed. Looked away.

 

Cas continued, without a modicum of accusation in his voice, “You are making yourself relive these things on purpose. Aren't you?”

 

Dean didn't say anything.

 

Cas shifted on the edge of the bed, and Dean kept staring at the space between his knees, unable to raise his eyes.

 

Hearing him say it out loud made it so clear.

 

“I'm afraid of forgetting,” Dean said, soft and shameful.

 

Cas said nothing.

 

“I'm afraid—if I don't remember—then who else is going to? He'll just—be _gone_ —” Dean said, and then he breathed, and it felt as if he hadn't breathed in decades, the way it came out of him, like a punch to the gut. “And I can't—Cas, I can't let that happen.”

 

They sat there, for a while.

 

When Dean glanced up at him, in that quiet, Cas' face was calm. Understanding, more like. And that was another kind of relief. They looked at one another, in the way they'd always been able to.

 

“I think,” Cas said, slowly, “that you are confusing _forgetting_ with _letting go._ ”

 

Dean let his head drop back down between his shoulders.

 

Cas let out a breath, closed his eyes for a moment.

 

“I think—that when he asked you to come here, to come to Lisa and keep going—he didn't just want you to be happy, Dean.” Cas smoothed out the bedspread underneath him, weighing each word as if it were made of iron. “He wanted you to live. He wanted you—he wanted you to get ahold of the things he never could. Because—well. In my opinion, because he knew it was the best way for you to love him when he was gone.”

 

Dean paused, and lifted his head a fraction, enough to slide his eyes back to him.

 

Cas pressed his lips together, shrugged, slightly.

 

“He thought that it was time you started loving him by loving yourself.”

 

Then he turned his head away, and smiled, sadly and privately, in that way of his.

 

“But then—I don't know. I'm sure I don't know anything about it,” he said, letting his hands lie loosely in his lap. He went quiet, then, contemplative, looking down at them.

 

Dean blinked, swallowed hard.

 

It solved nothing. But it was there—an idea; maybe a kind of light.

 

He reached across the mattress, far enough to grip Cas' wrist gently in his hand, and Cas looked at him, and for a moment they were brothers, too—and the space between them was the hole in the universe that both of them ached for, and they were the same.

 

“You do know,” Dean said, feeling the weird, pulseless warmth beneath his hand. “You know better than anyone.”

* * *

 

Castiel left him as the sun was going down. Before he vanished from the doorway of the room he looked out at the parking lot and said that the war in Heaven would be over soon.

 

“What are you gonna do then?” Dean asked.

 

Cas shrugged. It was still strange to see him do that, to see an angel shrug. He squinted at Dean in the dying light. “I don't know,” he said. “But I would like to see you before I decide.”

 

He hugged Dean, then, which was another strange thing. Dean hugged him back, and then he was gone, and Dean stood in the doorway, looking at the wet parking lot and the grey sky above it.

 

There was nothing scratching in his head anymore; nothing casting shadow on that newborn feeble light. Nothing looming like a shadow in the corner of the room, waiting to remind him of the empty spaces in his heart. Just a pale sort of calm, back there—a thin whisper, like a fog. It was gentle; it felt kind. It might have been Sam's voice. His wide grin set against the sun. It might have been his laughter.

 

Dean liked to think that it was.

 

He stepped inside and closed the door.

* * *

 

Lisa's voicemail picked up when he called—he supposed he deserved that. He closed his eyes while her cheerful voice told him to leave it at the tone and when the tone came he hesitated for an instant.

 

“Hey,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Hey, Lis—it's me.”

 

He paused again, trying to think of what to say. Outside the night was folding in over the Indian Head Motel, and the lights from the street were soaking into the puddles on the pavement. Someone across the lot was walking away, towards the road, just a dusky shape in the dark.

 

“I'm sorry,” he said, hoping the machine wouldn't cut him off. “I'm sorry I took off—and I'm sorry—” He closed his eyes, pulled himself together. “But I love you, Lisa—and I'm coming home soon—”

 

The first stars were coming out over Winamac.

 

“Lis?”

 

He swallowed hard again, feeling that laughter in his head, soft and far away, but it wasn't going anywhere; Sam was there.

 

Sam was there.

 

“I think I'm gonna be okay.”


End file.
